“Movement classes,” Fran hissed triumphantly, “tool of the trade. D’you know, if you’re particularly supple, you can actually learn to dislocate your shoulder at will? A gymnastic parlor trick. Who’d’ve thought it would come in handy?”
I should have known, Cathy thought in the split second after. The shoulder pain was the one she hadn’t sympathetically felt. Because there hadn’t been any pain. Oh, the spasms that’d racked Fran’s body had been real enough. But those few seconds immediately after . . . It was both amazing and appalling to think that Fran had clearheadedly improvised a plausible ruse out of her own genuine suffering.
Cathy tried to struggle out of Fran’s grasp. Fran reared an arm back quickly and slapped her so hard she heard ringing in her ears.
“That’s for lying to me!”
“I . . . never . . .” Cathy gasped.
“Your boyfriend works for the city??!! You’re here for Matt Sikes, I saw him at the theatre! As soon as you said it, I knew. I knew!”
Fran used her full weight to rock up and down on Cathy’s shoulders; Cathy tried to slap at her, but Fran kept her head back, and most of the blows fell short or landed harmlessly on Fran’s arms.
“He wants to keep me down, safe and Slag, just like before!” Fran raged.
“No!” Cathy shouted.
“Give me the code to get out of here or I’ll kill you!”
“NO!” Cathy roared, and by now her wind was back sufficiently that her legs, bent against her chest, could piston out, and they did, pushing Fran off, sending her reeling back into the sink.
“Kata-be,” Fran cursed, and Cathy got to her feet as fast as she could.
Fran was preparing to charge, and Cathy held her gaze, bobbing and weaving, back and forth, trying to forestall the inevitable. She had not forgotten her wrist band, nor the alert button. But she didn’t want to press it, not yet. Matt would forgive her if she bailed out, without question; but Matt believed Fran was worth saving; and Cathy, after all this, needed to know that was true. She would never know any such thing, though, if she pressed that button. Steinbach’s cronies would pull her out of here so fast the friction would burn away Fran’s eyebrows before they could finish falling—and Fran would have to take her slim chances alone. Cathy couldn’t let that happen.
And on that altruistic thought, she received Fran’s next attack . . .
. . . as Dr. Steinbach, making his rounds, passed the unoccupied fifth floor desk, looked automatically at the monitor and saw . . .
. . . Fran around Cathy’s waist, ramming her into the wall, as Cathy reflexively grabbed Fran’s hair to pull her head away, push her aside.
But the hair freely gave way, entire locks of it loose in Cathy’s hand, giving her no leverage at all. It was the sound of the hair leaving Fran’s head that shocked the actress into a moment of vulnerability, however, or so Cathy thought, because with no other reason for doing so, Fran pushed away, horror-struck, and shouted, “What are you DOing? What are you DOing?” as her hands went up to feel the damage to her head, and she realized that she was feeling a great, patchy bald spot—
—and that unleashed an ululating wail of fear and outrage that grew in volume and rose in pitch . . .
. . . and Steinbach said “Mother of us all!” and yelled for an orderly, whereupon a big, muscle-bound fellow answered the call, and they both went bolting for the cubicle . . .
. . . and Fran came rushing at Cathy fingernails first, slashing. With a survival instinct that came from Cathy knew not where, Cathy ducked, weaved, got behind Fran, and pushed the actress into the wall, head first, where she lost her purchase and body-slammed onto the floor.
And that’s when Cathy raced to grab one of the high-heeled shoes she’d left in the corner. Wielded deftly enough, a hard high heel can do as much damage as a stiletto, albeit more crudely; Cathy was counting on that; and as Fran was getting up, unseeing, she raised the shoe high.
She brought it down on the keypad control by the door, sending a shower of sparks flying.
She had seen, out of the corner of her eye, through the door’s window, the faces of Steinbach and the orderly. She knew they would drag her out of there if she didn’t come willingly; and since the door opened and closed electronically, she’d done the only thing she could think of that might buy her and Fran some more time together:
She sabotaged the lock mechanism.
Or at least she hoped she had . . .
. . . and her wish was granted, for on the other side of the door, Steinbach was punching 3051 frantically, over and over. He had seen what she’d done and blurted, “Jesus, Cathy, have you lost your mind?” but the door did not give because for the moment, the lock was well and truly jammed, and Steinbach, still trying the code in what he now knew full well was vain, muttered, “Come on, Cathy, don’t do this to me,” while the orderly waited nervously behind him, having no real purpose, shifting uneasily from foot to foot as inside . . .
. . . Cathy watched Fran trying to rise. And knew that if she was to have any chance here, any hope at all, she’d have to do something decisive, and fast, make a statement, set some ground rules—
—and then she knew what it was. Something out of character for her, something she would not like herself much for. But there wasn’t a lot of choice in this room, and she could only work with what she had—
—so she swooped down, grabbed Fran’s hospital gown by the nape of the neck with one hand, pulled up on the material around the waist with the other, and did exactly what she’d done last night, dragged Fran Delaney to the toilet, and put her face in it.
All the way in, into the water.
And held it there.
Despising herself, disgusted that it had come to this, held it there.
As Fran’s arms uselessly flailed.
The flailing getting weaker.
Held it there.
For five . . .
. . . ten . . .
. . . fifteen . . .
“. . . sixteen, seventeen, eighteen . . .”
(through gritted teeth, not even aware she’d begun counting out loud)
“. . . nineteen . . .” seconds
and on “Twenty!” she heaved Fran’s body up and flung it down as if it were no more consequential than a rag doll.
Fran landed with a thumping sound on her back, spluttering and dazed. There was almost a full minute of coughing, blinking, breath-catching and face-rubbing before she was able to collect herself. When at last she did, she stayed where she was on the floor, looking up at Cathy in astonishment.
“You might’ve drowned me,” she said.
Cathy returned the look.
What she thought was: I would not have drowned you, no.
What she thought was: But I wonder if, in bonding, I’ve come to share not only your physical pain but your need to lash out, your violence.
What she thought was: Yes, I wonder . . . but I suspect it was after all just me being angry, feeling desperate, looking for a way to get through to you. Can’t you see? If I want to get through to you, I am not about to drown you. I didn’t even want to hurt you. I only want to help.
What she said was:
“At last we understand one another.”
And on that note, the Leethaag continued.
C H A P T E R 1 4
TRAFFIC OUT OF downtown Los Angeles that late morning was gridlock purgatory, the worst for keeping up single-car surveillance on a moving vehicle. Sikes and Francisco had yet to discover that their man would be heading south.
The good news was that in a gridlock tail, the perp’s car is always just as jammed up as yours is. Maintain a healthy distance and together you can crawl along or idle in neutral forever. Probably he’ll never be any the wiser.
The bad news was that “probably” isn’t always good enough. If the perp is especially on the ball, he’ll notice the same car in his rearview mirror once too often, especially if his route is idiosyncratic. So naturally, part of the trick is decid
ing the precise parameters of “a healthy distance.” You don’t want to maintain too healthy a distance because you don’t want to remain stuck in traffic when up ahead it’s finally starting to clear for the car you’re tailing; suddenly he takes off and you’re stuck between a seventy-five-year-old grandma and a kamikaze computer operator from Taiwan, their horns blaring louder as the beep on your tracer device fades to nothing.
Now, if the traffic is free-flowing . . . well, then you have all kindsa tricks at your disposal—varying the car lengths between you and him, ducking onto and off of the main route, changing lanes, any number of things to vary the perp’s rearview visual. But on congested streets, these strategies are simply not an option. You have to maintain a holding pattern, hope you can appear to be just as stuck and frustrated as everyone else (because all a perp has to do is catch your eyes to grok that you’re being too attentive, that you care more about where he’s going than about where you’re going) . . . and pray.
Anagrams wore thin ten minutes into the ride, and the cruiser’s air conditioner kept threatening to fail, so the trip managed to be boring and suspenseful at the same time.
But, in the end, it was a good day for prayer, at least where George and Matt were concerned, because after “twenty-five minutes of this crap” (as Sikes called it), traffic broke and they were sailin’ smooth onto the San Diego Freeway, their man in the Mazda never suspecting.
Heading south.
Which caused George to muse, “I wonder where he’s going.”
On one level stating the obvious, that’s the whole reason for tailing a suspect in the first place: You wonder where he’s going.
But then again, they were heading south.
George spared a brief glimpse at Matt, who was reading his book on and off. “Matthew.”
“Um?”
“Do you suppose he knows of our investigation? Do you suppose that’s why he ended his ‘business relationship’ with Mr. Sled?”
It was, of course, the first question that had occurred to either of them the minute they heard Bob Sled’s account of events. But neither had wanted to speak it out loud, to acknowledge the possibility that the investigation had been compromised.
“Hard to say,” Matt replied. “It’s not like we’ve been top secret. Anybody who’s learned what we’re after could have alerted this guy. The hospital staff where Fran’s staying, Dr. LeBeque, someone connected with the theatre . . . hell, people we can’t even know about.”
At the moment, they didn’t even know about the guy they were tailing. They had called in the model and license plate number of his car, and DMV records had identified it as belonging to a sixty-eight-year-old woman, Anna Maria Corigliano of La Jolla. But there was no record of it having been stolen. Calls were being made to her home, to see about trying to get an ID on the driver—assuming the car had been legitimately borrowed—but so far there had been no answer. Other public records could be researched, based on this slim bit of information alone, but it was too soon to make that request of police department manpower; the two detectives, their hunches notwithstanding, simply didn’t have enough to go on yet. This was a specialized case, nothing politically attractive enough to give it “sexy” priority, and unless the videotape bore fruit (which they wouldn’t know for some hours), the fellow they were following could be officially suspected of exactly nothing.
And he was still heading south.
“Maybe it’s coincidence,” George hypothesized. “Maybe he felt the need to be represented by new outlets, precisely as the druggist reported, and we just happened to be there on the day he broke the news.”
“Maybe. But I’ll tell you what bothers me about that one. Why was he there at all? Sled couldn’t identify him by name or affiliation, didn’t have the wherewithal to track him down if there was no further delivery. The guy didn’t owe Sled a thing. Why not just find a new outlet to do business with and screw ’im?”
“Because there are too many variables. The drug is predicated upon dependence, the customers who use it need it. They depend, in turn, upon Bob Sled to make it available. If we apply your scenario, though, our round little apothecary wouldn’t know his supply had dried up since no one would have told him. So he’d advise his regular customers to be patient, thinking delivery imminent.”
“. . . and the customers would stay patient until it became too late?”
“Or they’d register complaints—with us or with the Better Business Bureau—about the way their druggist failed to make good on his assurances. They aren’t guilty of anything, what have they to lose?”
“Their anonymity, if they’re passing for human.”
“Which they lose in any event if they can’t get the drug. My point being that the clientele would become unpredictable, create too many waves that might be noted by the authorities. How much simpler to merely tell the druggist that you’re moving on so that he can alert his customers to look elsewhere while they have time.”
“That all makes sense, but it still leaves me with one big question. Bob Sled told us that as far as he understood, he ran one of only four phony Stabilite outlets in the Los Angeles area. I mean, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, the supplier could have been yanking his chain. But if we assume it’s the truth . . . Sled doesn’t know who the other current distributors are; the dealer isn’t about to tell him who the new distributors are gonna be; he can’t pass the information on to his customers. How the hell are the customers gonna find out where to go to get their stuff?”
“Big question, indeed, Matthew. Easy answer, I think.”
“Enlighten me.”
“The same way they found out about Bob Sled. Ask in the right—or the wrong—places. That kind of information is always available on the street if you want it badly enough.”
“True,” Matt nodded after a beat. “True.”
And then he looked at his watch, registered that they had been driving for over a half hour since clearing the gridlock, noted by the road signs that Los Angeles was now officially behind them, gauged by the landscape that they were running out of United States territory in which to follow their man, realized that the term “jurisdiction” was threatening to become a cruel joke, and exclaimed:
“Jesus, I hate it that he’s going south!”
Because it probably meant that their man could afford to go south.
In drug cases, suspects under surveillance, if they knew they were under surveillance, tended to do one of two things.
If they were low-level types, or scared, or stupid, they ascribed to what Matt Sikes called the cockroach theory: hit ’em with light, they scuttle for cover of darkness. That darkness was either their lair, full to brimming with damning evidence they would try to destroy before the cops got to it; or the lair of a perceived “protector,” someone higher up in the operation. The flight toward darkness didn’t always lead to immediate arrest but it almost always added to your chain of evidence, gave you new places and people to check out; and the more you had, the more opportunity there was for the Bad Guys to slip up.
But if they were smart, careful and cool . . .
. . . they simply went home. And south was a grand direction to travel if they wanted to go home. The scenery got prettier, the real estate values went up, the mountains were more impressive, you were closer to the ocean. And in that relative comfort, they waited you out. They kissed their wives, played with their kids, made like nice neighbors, and didn’t give a shit about your impatience. Because they had all the time in the world.
The woman who owned the car they were following—DMV identified her as a resident of La Jolla. If their guy was behind the wheel legitimately, maybe he was taking the car back to La Jolla; maybe he lived in La Jolla. Way the hell south, rural and rustic, featuring two beautiful theatres run by a fellow named McAnuff just off a remote university complex, and brisk, briny sea air. Crime? What crime? Not a lot of drug action there.
Now, of course, La Jolla was a hop, skip, and a jumping bean away
from the Mexico border. And there was so much drug action down there it made your teeth ache. But Mexico didn’t seem a likely locale for designer drug operations. And if it was—what difference? Sikes and Francisco had no hard evidence. If their guy crossed the border and the drugstore tape showed nothing and his use of the car was legit . . . they’d never be able to get him back. They didn’t even want to think about Mexico.
Better the guy should go home.
After Matt’s comment, the next two minutes went by in silence and despair.
George and he were beginning to think, That’s it, endgame, over.
And then their man got off an exit ramp that led into Carson County.
Exactly thirty-five minutes out of Los Angeles.
Taken by surprise, George nearly missed the ramp. He fishtailed a bit to adjust, suffering the angry car horn that blared past him down the freeway, and tolerating Sikes’s sardonic, “Nice one, George, way to be circumspect,” as his partner reflexively jammed both feet on an imaginary brake and leaned back into his seat. But the Mazda was too far ahead of them (George hoped) for the driver to pay any heed.
Carson was a suburban community. Just off the ramp were rest stops and fast food places, and a little further down, the residential section and a couple of modest shopping malls. But if you drove far enough, commercialism thinned out and gave way to open spaces, wooded areas, and a few large clearings.
Some of the clearings were occupied by smaller industrial firms that had made Carson their base. You could, Matt thought, work in worse surroundings. Nice to be away from the congestion of the city, but still be close enough for relatively quick access. Now why didn’t I ever think of that? he asked himself. And then answered, Because by the time you were old enough to appreciate the sentiment, it was too late.
The Mazda crested the rise of a little valley, turned left into it; George slowed, pulled to the side of the road, waiting, not wanting to be spotted by their quarry; with the tracer device, there was no chance of losing the fellow, not in this semibucolic environment. After about forty-five seconds, he moved the cruiser forward again, crested the hill himself, turned left.
Alien Nation #6 - Passing Fancy Page 18