by JF Freedman
She grabs Laura by the shoulders. “You’re going to have to pull yourself together. Can you do that?”
Miranda starts to answer for Laura, but Laura cuts her off. “Yes,” Laura says, in a firm tone that states “I can take charge of my life.” “I can do that.”
Kate looks at her. It’s a different woman she’s seeing—a real woman, not a kid anymore. Out of these awful ashes a life is growing, she realizes. Something is going to come from all this pain.
She returns to the problem at hand. “And you, too,” she warns Miranda.
“I will. Don’t worry.”
“Okay. Here’s the drill. I was never here.”
They both stare at her.
“That telephone call you got at the office?” she tells Miranda. “That was somebody calling to warn you that there was a problem up at your ranch. Maybe something to do with that drug deal, you weren’t sure. You didn’t want to come up here by yourself so you called Laura and told her to meet you here. You got here and found your mother-in-law dead, shot in the back. And you saw someone running away. A man. A tall man, athletic. You got a good look at him, you could ID him if you ever saw him again. That’s the story that you’re going to tell the police, and you’re sticking to it. Can you do that?”
Miranda nods. “Why are you doing this?” she asks.
“You don’t have to know. I’ll take these with me,” she says, brandishing the rifle and the shotgun. “They’ll never be seen again.”
She heads toward her car, then turns back. “Wait a couple of hours before you call the police. That’s imperative. You got that?”
Miranda nods yes.
Kate throws the rifle and shotgun in the trunk of her car and hightails it down the road.
One more piece of the puzzle to fit in. Then it’s over.
22
HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN
SHE SITS IN HER living room, waiting. It’s the first time she’s been back to her apartment since she went into hiding. She’s changed out of the clothes she wore up at the ranch. Now she is wearing a loose T-shirt and light silk Turkish trousers that are almost diaphanous. No bra. Her bikini underpants can be seen through the trousers. Her feet are bare, her toenails freshly painted. She has bathed and put on perfume.
The doorbell rings. She walks across the room and opens the door.
“Hello, stranger,” she says.
He has come from work, where she called him, so he’s wearing his uniform of sport coat, white shirt, slacks, tie. His gun is tucked into a holster clipped to his belt.
“Hello back,” Juan Herrera says to her. “I’ve been worried about you, Kate. I tried calling, I even stopped by.”
“I went to ground,” she says. “After what happened down in Orange County, I was afraid …” She stops. “Anyway, I’m back in the open now. So come on in.”
She stands aside so he can enter. Then she closes the door behind him and locks it.
The curtains have already been drawn.
“I need to see you,” she told him over the phone. “I’ve finally gotten to the bottom of the whole rotten mess. All that Sparks family shit. I thought you’d want to hear all about it. So I can put it all behind me.”
From when she hung up until the ring of the doorbell has been less than twenty minutes, which means he left his desk right away.
“You look good,” he tells her. He can’t help noticing her ass through the sheer pants, and her nipples showing under the T-shirt. “Real good.”
“Good enough to eat?” she teases him. She reaches behind him and slips his jacket off, tossing it onto a chair.
“Yes,” he answers slowly, a smile breaking out across his face. “I was going to leave for lunch in a few minutes, so I’m hungry.”
“Caught you in the nick of time,” she says. “Guess it’s my lucky day.”
They come into each other’s arms, a hot, hard embrace.
“How long can you stay?” she asks when they break.
“As long as it takes,” he answers. One hand is caressing a breast, the other tracing ribbons down her back.
“It could take a long time,” she smiles coquettishly. Her hand is going to his belt, loosening it.
“Damn. You’re frisky today,” he observes.
“I’m horny.”
“That’s pretty direct.”
“I haven’t been laid for a long time,” she tells him. “Ever since this.” She points to her face.
“You look good,” he said. “You shouldn’t worry about that.”
“I’m glad you feel that way. It’s important to me. You know what I went through,” she tells him, seriously. “More than anyone.”
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
“Does that mean I’m beautiful?” Playful again.
“About as beautiful as any woman I’ve ever known.”
“What about sexy?”
“For sure, sexy.”
“So am I turning you on?”
“You’ve always turned me on, Kate,” he says, dropping the bantering tone. “From the first time I laid eyes on you.”
“You mean you weren’t just being a nice guy and helping out someone the rest of the department wouldn’t?” she teases.
“No,” he answers. “I helped you out plenty before …” He leaves the rest unsaid. “Because I wanted to fuck you doesn’t mean I don’t like you, too.”
“I’m glad you feel that way. ’Cause that’s how I feel about you, too.”
His hand is under her shirt, caressing her bare breast. She has goose-bumps all over. He is hard as she strokes him through his pants.
“So what’s this important news you have for me?” he asks.
“All in good time. Let’s get to the important things first.”
She takes his hand and leads him into the bedroom.
“Get undressed,” she orders him. “I’ll be right back.” She pulls her T-shirt over her head and tosses it onto the floor, standing topless in front of him, her nipples hard, sticking straight out. “I need to get my protection. Don’t go away.”
He doesn’t need any further encouragement—he’s half undressed by the time she’s out of the room.
It’s warm in her bedroom. He lies on top of the covers, naked. His clothes are neatly folded, the crease in the trousers matching up, the shirt over them, then the tie. At some point he will have to shower, dress, and go back to work. Later for that. He can take the rest of the afternoon off without checking in; his time is pretty much his own at this stage in his career.
The bolstered gun lies on top of the neat pile.
He hears water running briefly in the bathroom.
“Watcha doing?” he calls.
“I won’t be long,” she calls back from the bathroom.
He can taste her—not just her mouth where he’s kissed her, but all of her. He still has that taste in his mouth’s memory, from when they made love before.
“Come on,” he calls again.
“This has to be right,” she answers. “This is a special occasion. Everything has to be right.”
She enters the room. She’s wearing a white terry-cloth robe, untied, the sides folding against her hips. He can see her vagina thrust forward towards him, her breasts hanging down. The incongruity of the prosaic robe and her frank nakedness under it makes for a very erotic image.
His cock is erect, rock-hard. He extends his arms to her. “Come here,” he beckons. His voice is hoarse, his throat constricted with sexual heat.
She stands at the foot of the bed, staring down at him. “You’re glad to see me,” she remarks, glancing at his swollen penis.
“We’re both glad to see you. Now come on.”
“In a minute.”
She reaches into one of the pockets of the robe and pulls out some papers.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“What I wanted to talk to you about.”
“I thought we were going to do that later.”
“I dec
ided to do it first. So we could get it out of the way.” She grins at him. “Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He pauses. “Why—should I be?”
She nods. “I think you’ll find what I’m going to tell you very interesting.”
His erection is wilting. It’ll come back fast enough, but he isn’t in the mood to talk, or listen. Still, it’s her deal. He’ll make a good show of being interested, and then he’ll fuck her brains out.
“You know what’s really interesting?” she asks him.
“No. What?” He pushes himself up against the headboard, arms behind his back. It’s more comfortable that way. If he has to talk and listen, he might as well get comfortable.
“How easily you manipulated me. And how willingly I let you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just an observation.”
“If anybody manipulated anybody, it was you,” he says. “You got a ton of information out of me, stuff no one else where I work would have told you. No one else would give you the time of day,” he adds.
“That’s true. So I guess that makes us even, right?”
“More than even.”
“Good. Oh, before I forget,” she says. “What does a lieutenant on the sheriff’s down here make after twenty years?”
“Why do you want to know?” he asks suspiciously. What the hell is this all about?
“This thing came up. I was talking to somebody, and it came up, I don’t remember. Maybe I was talking to someone on the Oakland Sheriff’s I used to work with. Asking about rates down here, in case he wanted to move.”
“Sixty-six thousand a year. But tell your friend not to bother,” he adds, “there’s no openings. The county doesn’t have any money, and there’s a waiting list as long as your arm. Answer your question?”
“Sort of, but not really. The thing is …” She looks at one of the pieces of paper in her hand. “The reason I asked is, two days after Frank Bascomb expired in your jail you deposited $100,000 into your bank account, and there’s no record where it came from. Sixty-six K is good money, but it doesn’t account for a sudden windfall of $100,000. And then, a week later, you transferred the hundred into an offshore money-market account in the Cayman Islands, which is a place people hide money so the U.S. tax collectors can’t find it. In impolite society it’s called ‘laundering,’” she adds.
He sits bolt upright. “What the fuck? Where did you find … what’re you talking about?” he stammers. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“A payoff, of course,” she answers calmly. “What else could it be?”
“It could be my wife’s money. Which is what it was,” he says with indignation. “She and her sisters owned some property up north, which they sold, and she wanted to invest it, so I did it for her.”
“So it had nothing to do with the fact that you were on duty at the jail that night,” she says, pressing on. “The night Bascomb so-called hung himself, which you and I both know is bullshit. We do agree on that point, at least, don’t we?”
“It was Fiesta,” he points out. He doesn’t like the direction this conversation is headed, not a bit. “Everyone in the department was on duty that night.”
She shakes her head. “But not jail duty.” She looks at another sheet of paper she’s holding. “According to official records you went to the jail an hour after Frank Bascomb was locked up and volunteered to take over from another officer. You relieved him of his duty, which you didn’t have to do, since you have seniority. You don’t have to pull that kind of duty at all, in fact. And according to your records—” she glances down at the papers again—“you hadn’t worked at the jail for over a year. Which is no surprise, since you’re a detective and detectives don’t normally work inside the jail.”
He stares at her. “You’ve been a busy little beaver, haven’t you?”
“You don’t know how busy I’ve been. Not the half of it.”
“Well, for your information, since you’re so curious about my comings and goings, that officer had a sick wife, and he asked me for a favor. That’s the reason—there’s nothing sinister about it.”
“Oh, good. Then I guess there’s nothing sinister about the strange fact that Frank Bascomb was transferred out of a high-security cell into a common tank, either.”
“It was a clerical error.”
“No,” she tells him. “It was deliberate.”
His eyes narrow. “You sound like you’re making an accusation.”
She flips him a county jail computer printout. He picks it up, looks at it. As he does so he edges closer to the side of the bed, the side where his gun is sitting in its holster on top of his neatly folded clothes.
“Bascomb’s arrest sheet was altered,” she says. “From a major drug-trafficking offense down to a petty possession charge, barely a felony at all. Which made it easy to kick him out of his isolation cell, under twenty-four-hour watch, into a group tank. With a whole bunch of drunks who had just ten minutes before being processed and put into that cell.” She stares at him intently. “The same men, coincidentally, who tried to kill me the night that phony informant set me and Laura up.”
He lunges for his gun.
Hers is out of her robe pocket while his hand is a good five feet from even grabbing the holster, let alone pulling the weapon out.
“Not a cool idea,” she tells him, cocking her automatic and aiming it at his pecker. “Unless you want to talk in a high voice for the rest of your life. I’m loaded up with Winchester Black Talons,” she says, “you know the awful mess they make.”
“You’re crazy.”
She pulls the robe around her, tying the cord tightly. “Peep show’s over.”
“You’re making the biggest mistake of your life.”
“No,” she shoots back. “The biggest mistake of my life was trusting you, taking you into my confidence. You were in this from the get-go.” Her free hand balls into a fist—a fist she’d like to smash his face in with, like hers was. “As soon as I got on this case—the first time I went down to the jail to check up on Wes Gillroy—you found out about it and called me in a flash with this bullshit story that I needed help, and you were such a sweet guy, you’d take care of me when no one else would.” She stares hard at him. “You needed to know what I knew, didn’t you, Juan?—so you could keep the brakes on. And like a dumb fucking idiot I played right into your hands. I kept giving you more and more information—as soon as I knew anything, so did you. Which made it pretty easy to counter my every move. Even to the point of setting me up to be murdered.”
He starts to move.
“Freeze,” she commands. “I will have no problem at all pulling the trigger on you, Juan. Not after what you’ve done to me.”
He does as she tells him.
“Dorothy Sparks hired you, didn’t she?” she goes on. “That was her hundred grand you banked. And there have been other payments, going back. You’ve been on her payroll for years. The documentation exists, it’s got you nailed.” She shakes her head, as if trying to shake a bad dream out of it. “You’re a disgusting son of a bitch, Juan. A cop on the take. That’s the lowest form of life there is.”
“This is all conjecture,” he spits out. “It doesn’t mean shit.”
“Dorothy Sparks knew Frank Bascomb had been arrested even before he got to the jail,” she continues. “She was this nice old lady who was always doing nice things for the department, throwing benefits for widows and orphans, real do-gooder stuff. She even monitored police calls, a strange habit for a seventy-five-year-old heiress, but she had good reasons. She was protecting her investment. So as soon as Bascomb was booked, she made a call to her man on the inside. You, Juan. She told you to get your ass down there and fix things up so he could never put her into it. And like a good soldier, that’s exactly what you did.”
“No fucking way.”
“Only one person knew I was going down
to Newport Beach to look for Wes Gillroy. You. You were the only one I confided in, because I had to have some backup, and you were the logical choice.”
Her hand is shaking, holding the gun.
“You followed me down, you shit. I led you right to them. You killed them, yes—but my hand was on the gun as much as yours, because I was the Judas goat that led those two poor bastards to slaughter.”
She takes a deep breath.
“And if I had been on time for our rendezvous, I would have been dead along with them. You had already tried to have me killed once. This time you were going to make sure, you were going to do it yourself, and you sure as hell weren’t going to take any prisoners.”
He looks at her, trying to decide when to go for his gun.
“How long did you wait for me? Ten minutes? Fifteen? You should have waited five minutes longer, but you couldn’t, you lost your nerve, so you bailed out and called the local cops, hoping I’d show and walk right into it. And I almost did. But thank God my blind dumb luck was with me a second time.”
She takes another deep breath. Her nerves are shot.
“You had already killed Frank Bascomb,” she says. “You personally killed Wes, and Morgan. And you would have killed me.”
“You don’t have proof about any of this shit,” he says in answer.
She reaches into her robe pocket again and pulls out a baggie that has a bullet inside it.
“In your panic you left one of the shells behind, down in Newport Beach. It rolled under the bed, you couldn’t find it like you found all the others.”
She dangles it in front of him.
“This shell and your 9 mm. I’d bet my life against the hundred thousand in your secret bank account they’re a perfect match.”
She tosses it in her hand. “The smoking bullet. From the smoking gun.”
And for the split-second she looks away to catch the baggie he has lunged for his gun and has pulled it and is turning towards her to fire.
Which is how she planned it.