by Tami Hoag
“What the fuck is this?” I shouted, smacking him in the chest with the magazine.
He took a step back, looking offended. “It might be Sidelines, but I can't read with my nipples, so I can't say for certain. Jesus Christ, El. What did you do to your hair?”
I hit him again, harder, wanting to hurt him. He grabbed the magazine away from me, took another quick step out of range, and turned to the cover. “Betsy Steiner's stallion, Hilltop Giotto. Have you seen him? He's to die for.”
“You told a reporter I'm a private investigator.”
“They asked me who you were. I had to tell them something.”
“No, you didn't have to. You didn't have to tell them anything.”
“It's only Sidelines. For Christ's sake.”
“It's my name in a goddam magazine read by thousands of people. Thousands of people now know where to find me. Why don't you just paint a big target on my chest?”
He frowned. “Only dressage people read the dressage section. And then only to see if their own names are in the show results.”
“Thousands of people now think I'm a private investigator.”
“What was I supposed to tell them? The truth?” Said as if that were the most distasteful option. Then I realized it probably was.
“How about ‘no comment'?”
“That's not very interesting.”
I pointed at Molly Seabright. “That little girl has come here to hire me. She thinks I can help her find her sister.”
“Maybe you can.”
I refused to state the obvious: that I couldn't even help myself.
Sean lifted a shoulder with lazy indifference and handed the magazine back to me. “What else have you got to do with your time?”
Irina emerged from the barn, leading Oliver—tall, elegant, and beautiful, the equine version of Sean. Sean dismissed me and went to his teak mounting block.
Molly Seabright was sitting on the park bench with her hands folded in her lap. I turned and walked to the barn, hoping she would just go away. D'Artagnon's bridle hung from the ceiling on a four-pronged hook near an antique mahogany cabinet full of leather-cleaning supplies. I chose a small damp sponge from the work table, rubbed it over a bar of glycerine soap, and began to clean the bridle, trying to narrow the focus of my mind on the small motor skills involved in the task.
“You're very rude.”
I could see her from the corner of my eye: standing as tall as she could—five-feet-nothing—her mouth a tight little knot.
“Yes, I am. That's part of the joy of being me: I don't care.”
“You're not going to help me.”
“I can't. I'm not what you need. If your sister is missing, your parents should go to the cops.”
“I went to the Sheriff's Office. They wouldn't help me either.”
“You went? What about your parents? They don't care your sister is missing?”
For the first time Molly Seabright seemed to hesitate. “It's complicated.”
“What's complicated about it? She's either missing or she's not.”
“Erin doesn't live with us.”
“How old is she?”
“Eighteen. She doesn't get along with our parents.”
“There's something new.”
“It's not like she's bad or anything,” Molly said defensively. “She doesn't do drugs or anything like that. It's just that she has her own opinions, that's all. And her opinions aren't Bruce's opinions . . .”
“Who's Bruce?”
“Our stepfather. Mom always sides with him, no matter how asinine he is. It makes Erin angry, so she moved out.”
“So Erin is technically an adult, living on her own, free to do whatever she wants,” I said. “Does she have a boyfriend?”
Molly shook her head, but avoided my eyes. She wasn't so sure of that answer, or she thought a lie might better serve her cause.
“What makes you think she's missing?”
“She was supposed to pick me up Monday morning. That's her day off. She's a groom at the show grounds for Don Jade. He trains jumpers. I didn't have school. We were going to go to the beach, but she never came or called me. I called her and left a message on her cell phone, and she never called me back.”
“She's probably busy,” I said, stroking the sponge down a length of rein. “Grooms work hard.”
Even as I said it I could see Irina sitting on the mounting block, face turned to the sun as she blew a lazy stream of cigarette smoke at the sky. Most grooms.
“She would have called me,” Molly insisted. “I went to the show grounds myself the next day—yesterday. A man at Don Jade's barn told me Erin doesn't work there anymore.”
Grooms quit. Grooms get fired. Grooms decide one day to become florists and decide the next day they'd rather be brain surgeons. On the flip side, there are trainers with reputations as slave masters, temperamental prima donnas who go through grooms like disposable razors. I've known trainers who demanded a groom sleep every night in a stall with a psychotic stallion, valuing the horse far more than the person. I've known trainers who fired five grooms in a week.
Erin Seabright was, by the sound of it, headstrong and argumentative, maybe with an eye for the guys. She was eighteen and tasting independence for the first time. . . . And why I was even thinking this through was beyond me. Habit, maybe. Once a cop . . . But I hadn't been a cop for two years, and I would never be a cop again.
“Sounds to me like Erin has a life of her own. Maybe she just doesn't have time for a kid sister right now.”
Molly Seabright's expression darkened. “I told you Erin's not like that. She wouldn't just leave.”
“She left home.”
“But she didn't leave me. She wouldn't.”
Finally she sounded like a child instead of a forty-nine-year-old CPA. An uncertain, frightened little girl. Looking to me for help.
“People change. People grow up,” I said bluntly, taking the bridle down from the hook. “Maybe it's your turn.”
The words hit their mark like bullets. Tears rose behind the Harry Potter glasses. I didn't allow myself to feel guilt or pity. I didn't want a job or a client. I didn't want people coming into my life with expectations.
“I thought you would be different,” she said.
“Why would you think that?”
She glanced over at the magazine lying on the shelf with the cleaning supplies, D'Artagnon and I floating across the page like something from a dream. But she said nothing. If she had an explanation for her belief, she thought better of sharing it with me.
“I'm nobody's hero, Molly. I'm sorry you got that impression. I'm sure if your parents aren't worried about your sister, and the cops aren't worried about your sister, then there's nothing to be worried about. You don't need me, and believe me, you'd be sorry if you did.”
She didn't look at me. She stood there for a moment, composing herself, then pulled a small red wallet from the carrying pouch strapped around her waist. She took out a ten-dollar bill and placed it on the magazine.
“Thank you for your time,” she said politely, then turned and walked away.
I didn't chase after her. I didn't try to give her her ten dollars back. I watched her walk away and thought she was more of an adult than I was.
Irina appeared in my peripheral vision, propping herself against the archway as if she hadn't the strength to stand on her own. “You want I should saddle Feliki?”
Erin Seabright had probably quit her job. She was probably in the Keys right now enjoying her newfound independence with some cute good-for-nothing. Molly didn't want to believe that because it would mean a sea change in her relationship with the big sister she idolized. Life is full of disappointments. Molly would learn that the same way as everyone: by being let down by someone she loved and trusted.
Irina gave a dramatic sigh.
“Yes,” I said. “Saddle Feliki.”
She started toward the mare's stall, then I asked a question for which I would h
ave been far better off not having an answer.
“Irina, do you know anything about a jumper trainer named Don Jade?”
“Yes,” she said casually, not even looking back at me. “He is a murderer.”
KILL THE MESSENGER
by TAMI HOAG
On sale July 2004
LOWELL HANDED HIM a five-by-seven-inch padded manila envelope. He hung a cigarette on his lip and it bobbed up and down as he spoke while he fished in his baggy pants pocket for a lighter. “I appreciate you dropping this for me, kid. You've got the address?”
Jace repeated it from memory.
“Keep it dry,” Lowell said, blowing smoke at the dingy ceiling.
“Like my life depends on it.”
FAMOUS LAST WORDS, Jace would think later when he looked back on this night. But he didn't think anything as he went out into the rain and pulled the U-lock off his bike.
Instead of putting the package in his bag, he slipped it up under his T-shirt and tucked the shirt inside the waistband of his bike shorts. Warm and dry.
He climbed on the bike under the blue neon of the Psychic Readings sign and started to pedal, legs heavy, back aching, fingers cold and slipping on the wet handlebars. His weight shifted from pedal to pedal, the bike tilting side to side, the lateral motion gradually becoming forward motion as he picked up speed, the aches gradually melding into a familiar numbness.
One last run.
He would leave his paperwork 'til morning. Drop this package, go home, and crawl into that hot shower. He tried to imagine it: hot water pounding on his shoulders, massaging out the knots in the muscles, warm steam cleansing the stink of the city from his nostrils and soothing lungs that had spent the day sucking in car exhaust. He imagined Mrs. Chen's hot and sour soup, and clean sheets on the futon, and did his best to ignore the cold rain pelting his face and deglazing the oil on the surface of the street.
His mind distracted, he rode on autopilot. Past the 76 station, take a right. Down two blocks, take a left. The side streets were empty, dark. Nobody hung around in this part of town at this time of night for any good reason. The businesses in the dirty, low, flat-roofed buildings—a glass shop, an air-conditioning place, a furniture stripping place, an auto body shop—closed up at six.
He might have thought it was a strange destination for a package from a lawyer, except that the lawyer was Lenny, and Lenny's clients were what Jace's mother would have naively described as “colorful.”
He checked address numbers as lighting allowed. The drop would be the first place on the right on the next block. Except that the first place on the right on the next block was a vacant lot.
Jace cruised past, checked the number on the next available building, which was dark save for the security light hanging over the front door.
Apprehension scratched like a fingernail on the back of his neck. He swung around in the street and rode slowly past the vacant lot again.
Headlights flashed on, blinding him for a second.
What the hell kind of drop was this? Drugs? A payoff? Whatever it was, Jace wasn't making it. Only a fool would ride into this and ask for a signature on a manifest.
Now he was pissed. Pissed and scared. Sent to a vacant lot in the dead of fucking night. Fuck that. Fuck Lenny Lowell. He could take his package and shove it up his ass.
Jace stood on his pedals and started to go.
The car lurched forward, engine roaring like a charging beast as it made straight for him.
For a split second it seemed Jace didn't—couldn't—move. Then he was going, legs pumping like pistons, the bike's tires slipping on the wet street. If he ran straightaway, the car would be on him like a cat on a mouse. He turned hard left instead. The bike's back end skated sideways on the slick pavement. He stuck a foot down to keep from falling, pulled the bike back under himself. Then he was charging the car.
Heart in his throat, he juked right, nearly too late, jumped the curb back into the vacant lot, shooting past the car—big, dark, domestic. He heard the grind of metal on pavement as the car went off the curb and bottomed out. Tires squealed on the wet street as it swung a wide, awkward, skidding turn.
Jace made for the alley as hard as he could go, praying it wouldn't dead-end. In the heart of downtown he was like a street rat that knew every sewer pipe, every Dumpster, every crack in a wall that could offer a shortcut, escape, shelter, hiding place. Here he was vulnerable, a rabbit caught in the open. Prey.
The car was coming after him. The predator. The headlights bucked up and down in the gloom as the car banged back up over the curb.
Jace had had cars come after him in traffic—kids screwing around, men with rage disorders pissed off that he had cut in front of them or skitched a ride up a hill or knocked a side mirror. Assholes trying to make a point, trying to give him a scare. He had never been set up. He had never been hunted.
If he could get to the end of the alley before the car turned down the alley and spotlit him, he had a fifty-fifty shot at ditching them. The end of the alley looked nine miles away.
And it was already too late.
The high beams slapped at his back like a paw reaching out to tag him. The car came, as loud as a train, sending trash cans scattering like bowling pins.
Shit shit shit.
His luck was running out faster than the alley was. He couldn't outrun the car. He couldn't turn and ditch the car. To his left: buildings shoulder to shoulder, backed with Dumpsters and boxes and discarded junk—an obstacle course. To his right: a chain-link fence crowned with razor wire. On his ass: the angel of death.
Jace reached back with one hand and jerked his U-lock out of his messenger bag. The bumper kissed his back tire. The bike jerked. He nearly came off, nearly fell onto the hood of the car. Moving as close as he could against the fence, Jace touched his brakes, dropped just behind the predator's bumper.
Jace swung the heavy U-lock left-handed into the windshield. A spiderweb of cracks exploded across the span of glass. The car swerved into him, drove him sideways into the fence. Jace hurled the lock at the car, turned, and grabbed hold of the chain-link fence with both hands, hanging on hard as the bike was yanked out from under him. The toe of his right shoe got hung up in the pedal clip and his body jerked wildly sideways as the car pushed the bike forward.
The fence bit into his fingers as the bike tried to drag him. It felt like his arms were being torn out of their sockets, that his foot was being wrenched off at the ankle—then suddenly he was free and falling.
He landed on his back on the cracked asphalt, rolled, and scrambled up onto his knees, his eyes on the car as his bike went under the back tire and died a terrible death.
His only transportation. His livelihood. Gone.
He was on his own. On foot. And one foot was missing a shoe. Pain burned through his wrenched ankle as Jace pushed himself to his feet and ran for the buildings before the car could come to a complete stop.
The voice of his survival instinct screamed through his brain. Go go go!!!
He was young, he was fast, he was highly motivated. He set his sights on a half wall blocking the space between two buildings. He would hit it running, vault over the side, and be gone. Bum ankle or no, he could damn well outrun the asshole driving that car.
But he couldn't outrun a bullet.
The shot hit the Dumpster a foot to Jace's left almost simultaneously as he heard the report.
Fuck!
He had to get over that wall. He had to get over it. Get over it and run like hell.
Footfalls were coming hard behind him.
The second shot went wide right and hit a Dumpster.
A man shouted, “Fuck!”
Too close. Too close.
Footfalls coming hard behind him.
Jace launched himself at the wall and was summarily yanked backward as his pursuer grabbed hold of the messenger bag he wore strapped across his back.
He fell back into the man, and momentum carried them both backward, the
ir feet tangling. The predator's body cushioned the fall as they went down. Jace scrambled to get his feet under him, to wriggle away. Predator hung tight to the messenger bag.
“Fucking little shit!”
Jace swung an elbow back, connected hard with some part of the guy's face. A bone cracked nearly as loudly as the gunshot had, and for a split second the bastard's hold let loose and he cursed a blue streak. Jace ducked down and twisted out of the bag's strap and lunged again toward the wall.
Predator grabbed hold of the back of Jace's rain slicker with one hand and swung at him with the other. The Dollar Store rain poncho tore away like wet tissue. The butt of the gun glanced off the back of Jace's helmet. Stars burst bright before his eyes, but he kept moving.
Over the wall! Over the wall!
He hit it running, scrambled up and over, and tumbled ass over teakettle as he landed, rolling through mud and muck and garbage and water.
The canyon between the buildings was pitch black, the only light at the end of the tunnel the dim silver glow of a distant sodium vapor lamp. He ran toward it, never expecting to reach it, expecting to feel the thump and burn of a bullet passing through his back, tearing through his body, ripping apart organs and blood vessels. He would probably be dead before he hit the ground.
But still he ran.
The bullet didn't come.
He broke out of the alley, turned left, and raced along the fronts of the dark buildings, jumping shrubbery and low walls of tired landscaping. As he landed on the other side of a row of scrubby juniper bushes, the bad ankle buckled beneath him and he fell, gravel tearing at his hands as he tried to break the impact. He expected footfalls coming behind him, another shot aimed at his back, but no one was coming yet.
Panting, dizzy, Jace struggled once again to his feet and stumbled forward. At the next break between buildings, he ducked back into the cover of darkness to hide like a wounded animal. Halfway down the side of the building he stopped and fell against the rough concrete wall, wanting to puke, afraid the sound would draw his predator and get him killed.
Doubled over, he cupped his hands over his mouth and tried to slow his breathing. His heart felt like it would burst through his chest wall and flop out onto the ground, bouncing and twitching like a beached fish. His head was spinning. His brain felt like it was swirling around in a toilet bowl, ready to be sucked down the drain.