“I guess that’s not all he’s serious about.”
Sutter squinted at me. “You think?” he said. His voice was bitter. He shook his head. “Sorry. Yeah, Siggy’s got a hair up his ass about me. And if he starts thinking I’ve made him look bad in front of his guys—made him look weak—it’s only going to get worse.” He finished his beer and set the bottle carefully on the table. “Got a cure for that? A hair extraction procedure?”
I shook my head. “Cash might work. Lots of people swear by its soothing relief.”
He smiled. “We can hope.”
“The problem is, we’re not going to get anything out of the Brays in three days’ time—if we get anything from them at all.”
Sutter shook his head. “How’re you fixed for cash?”
I watched the traffic on Foothill, which passed in an endless, hypnotic stream and fluttered in waves of heat from the pavement. I sighed. “I’ve got what I put aside for a down payment on the building. It’s a little over a hundred grand.”
Sutter nodded slowly. “If things work out, you can take it out of what we get from the Brays.”
“And if they don’t work out?”
He shrugged. “Mi sofá es tu sofá.”
—
The clinic was closed when I returned, buttoned up and dark. I felt guilty about running out at midday, but grateful that I had to face neither patients nor Lydia. I climbed the stairs, kicked off my shoes, and lay on the bed; I was drifting into sleep when my phone chirped.
“Tomorrow night’s good,” Anne Crane said. Her voice was clipped and tired, and there were other voices in the background. “My video guy will be here, and I have a conference room booked for eight o’clock, and a stenographer.”
“Thanks, Anne. I appreciate it.”
“Just be here at eight with…whoever,” she said, “and don’t forget—you’re supposed to send me notes.” And then she was gone.
Along with any chance of sleep. I sighed and cranked up my Mac, and spent forty-five minutes drinking coffee and typing three pages of bullet points that I e-mailed to Anne. Then I grabbed my car keys.
—
Jiffy-Lab was a twenty-four-hour drug, STD, and DNA testing lab in a Koreatown strip mall, wedged between a martial arts studio and a UPS store. And Nate Rash, who worked there, owed me for restarting his sister’s heart when she stopped it with heroin. It was past eight on Tuesday night when I parked my Honda out front. The UPS was dark, and the sensei was locking his dojo, but the gruesome fluorescents were still lit at Jiffy-Lab. I killed my engine, and Nate climbed into the passenger seat.
He was red-haired and gangly, with a patchy beard and piercings in his nose and both ears. His purple scrubs were wrinkled and dotted with what I hoped were food stains.
Nate eyed the plastic zip bags in my hand. His voice was soft and reedy. “Those for me?”
I nodded. “Two buccal samples. A is a woman, B is a male child.”
He took the bags. “Mother and son?”
“That’s what you’re going to tell me.”
“I guess you’re not worried about chain of custody.”
“We’ll get to that later, depending on what you say. How long?”
He shrugged. “A couple days.”
“Sooner would be better.”
“Getting paid wouldn’t suck either,” he said, and climbed from the car.
The parking lot was quiet, and I sat there for a while, my hands at twelve o’clock on the steering wheel, my forehead on my hands. The air in the Honda was stale, and smelled of exhaustion and fear—chronic conditions of late. I’d been driving with one eye on my rearview mirror for days now, jumping at shadows, and searching passing faces for ones I’d seen too many times before. Worse still, I was getting tired of looking over my shoulder—too tired to take care. That, I knew, was when bad things—lethal things—could happen. I thought about turning the key in the ignition, but my hands were suddenly like someone else’s hands, and my arms felt like lead. The smart move was to head home, bar the doors, raise the drawbridge, and pull the covers over my head, but the thought of the empty apartment in the empty building—the dark clinic like a cave below, the echo of my footsteps on the stairs, and the silence afterward—turned my chest icy.
There was a rap on the car window and I bolted up. It was a woman, worried-looking, with one earbud plugged in and the other dangling near her clavicle. I ran the window down.
“You okay?” she asked. “You looked like you passed out or something. Or like you were crying.”
“I’m all right,” I said, and the woman nodded. I watched her climb into an ancient Volvo, and watched the car dissolve into the blur of headlights on Third Street. Passed out or crying—that seemed to cover the range of my options just then.
CHAPTER 38
They were fond of gray at Burnham Fiedler. Smoke, dove, steel, pearl, and charcoal colored the walls, floors, and furniture, along with most of the lawyers I’d met there, and I found it hard to spend time in their offices without feeling that my head was wrapped in fog. But there were no gray lawyers around at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, when Sutter stepped off the elevator with Elena—no one but me and a cleaning woman, who was wrestling with an asthmatic vacuum.
Elena took careful steps, and her dark eyes darted left and right as she came into the reception area. Sutter had conjured a dress and accessories for her from someplace, a simple blue shift that she wore with a gray belt, flat gray shoes, and a kerchief with pale flowers on it around her neck. A blue ribbon held her ponytail in place, and she looked like a Mormon girl setting out on her mission.
The cleaning woman cursed softly in Spanish, and Elena froze. Sutter put a hand on her arm.
“Right on time,” I said. “Any problems?”
Sutter shook his head. “Didn’t see anything. Yossi was watching our backs, and he says we’re cool. I just wish we weren’t quite so close to those PRP dicks.”
I followed Sutter’s gaze to the windowed wall and the neighboring office tower that looked close enough to touch. How long since I’d been over there with Amanda Danzig and Kyle Bray? A few days? A year?
“I think their windows face the other way,” I said. “Who’s with Alex?”
“Evie, Franco, and three other guys.”
“Have I met Evie?”
“You’d remember if you had.”
“We’re down here,” I said.
Anne Crane was at the end of a dark hallway, in a conference room that had a long glossy table, chairs that looked like parts of a spaceship, a legal stenographer in a short green skirt, and a man with tattoos and many black nylon gear bags. The man fixed a camera atop a tripod, and pointed it at the head of the table, at a pair of chairs and a pair of microphones there. He checked the viewfinder, then crossed the room to adjust another camera aimed at the same spot.
Anne was sitting, looking at the pages of a fax, and adding to a long list of notes on a yellow legal pad. She wore tailored navy pants and a pale-pink blouse that was untucked in the back. She looked up at me when I stepped in, and then beyond me, into the hallway.
“That’s Elena?” she said quietly. I nodded. Anne lifted the fax pages. “And the notes you sent? This stuff is really…for real?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“Christ,” Anne said, shaking her head. “Is the little boy with her?”
“He’s with babysitters tonight.”
Anne peered into the hallway again, at Sutter this time. “Babysitters like him? He looks like a ninja.”
I nodded. “He’s a friend of mine. He does security work, among other things.”
Anne’s eyes narrowed. “Is security going to be a problem tonight? Because, besides the building guys, we don’t have—”
“It’s covered.”
“By your ninja pal, all by himself?”
“He’s got a friend downstairs.”
“Interesting social network you’ve got. How’s the little boy doing?”
“H
e’s okay, I think. I hope. He seems to be a pretty tough little guy.”
“He’d better be. You might want to think about DNA testing for—”
“The samples are in the lab.”
Anne nodded. “Should we get started, then?”
Anne made brief introductions, and Elena said a quiet hello and took a seat in front of the microphones. Anne invited Sutter and me to leave.
“The fewer distractions, the better,” she said, and she closed the conference room door.
We went back to the reception area, and then Sutter disappeared down another corridor. He returned a few minutes later, laughing and speaking amiably in Spanish to one of the cleaning guys.
“Later, hombre,” he said to the cleaner, who pushed his cart down another hall. Sutter took a seat next to mine, stretched out his legs, and sighed. “We should be good up here. Only access besides the elevator are fire stairs on either end of the floor, and they don’t open from the stairwell side.”
I nodded, and looked at our reflections in the big windows. I was pale in the glass, and rumpled, and Sutter looked like weather-beaten totem. In the years I’d known him, I’d seen him look this tired only a few times, and all of them after firefights. He pulled a black semiautomatic from behind his back, checked the magazine, and yawned. He put the gun in his lap and closed his eyes.
“Should I wake you if Siggy’s guys come off the elevator?” I said.
“I’m not sleeping—just resting my retinas.”
“When’s the last time you actually slept?”
“Not sure. How about you?”
“I think I did last night, but it didn’t do much good.”
Sutter smiled. “You got the itch. I got it too.”
“What itch?”
“Between your shoulder blades—from being in somebody’s crosshairs. It makes you a little crazy. Used to drive me nuts back in the sand pile. It was between the shoulder blades for me; other guys got it other places. I knew one dude got a purple rash the size of a quarter on his forehead, right between the eyes.”
“So what’s the treatment, Dr. Sutter?”
Sutter slouched lower in his chair and smiled. “Me—I find whoever’s on the other end of the scope and…” He made a gun with thumb and forefinger of his left hand.
“That doesn’t work for me.”
“Trust me, brother, it works—but it’s the side effects you got to worry about. They build up over time.”
“I imagine.”
“That’s why I try not to….” Sutter paused and sighed deeply. “But I tell you, Siggy doesn’t make it easy.”
“You think that’s what it’s going to come to with him?”
“It will if he doesn’t get his money. Which is why we’re seeing him tomorrow night. With the cash.”
I nodded. “I’ll go to the safe-deposit box in the morning.”
Sutter sighed and closed his eyes again. “It sucks, right—paying off a guy like that?”
“A little bit.”
“Think bridge loan—you and your girl in there are going to shake some cash from the Brays.”
“I wish I was that confident.”
Sutter opened one eye and looked at me, but said nothing.
Cleaners went to and fro through the darkened reception area, and finally decamped altogether, but still we waited. Lights winked out in the nearby buildings, and jets crossed the sky, and my reflection floated in the black window glass like a rumpled ghost. Sutter was silent and still. It seemed that days passed, but it was two and a half hours. Sutter stood suddenly and the gun disappeared, and a moment later Anne was there, with Elena two steps behind. Anne was bleary-eyed and white, and she caught my elbow and led me to a corner.
“This is the audio,” she said, handing me a flash drive. “I can give you video and a transcript tomorrow.”
“How’d she do?”
“She’s…she’s a good witness. She keeps things simple and lets the facts do the work. And her English got better as we went along. What you laid out in your notes was bad enough, but when she tells it it’s much worse—maybe because she’s so matter-of-fact about everything. That makes it more horrible. If I was in a courtroom and she was a witness for the other side, I’d be thinking hard about settlement.”
I nodded. “I hope that comes across.”
“It will. She couldn’t care less about the cameras, or who else was in the room, and that makes for a good video.” Anne paused and glanced across the room, at Sutter and Elena, who were standing near the elevators. “Something else comes across too, though,” she said softly. “Something you want to be careful about.”
“What something?”
“She never lost her shit when she was making her statement—nothing even close—but, still, I got the feeling that Elena is a seriously angry girl.”
“How can she not be—given everything she’s been through?”
“I’m talking Carrie kind of angry, if you know what I mean. Like rage. You want to take care around somebody like that.”
“Thanks, Anne.”
She nodded and disappeared down the hallway, and I joined Sutter and Elena at the elevators. “How’re you feeling?” I asked her.
Her voice was empty and exhausted. “I want to go to Alex now.”
CHAPTER 39
In a bathroom that was spartan at best—cracked tile, rust-stained porcelain, and failing grout—my showerhead was the single luxury. The owner of a plumbing supply around the corner had sent it over last year by way of thanks after I’d patched up his son, who’d driven a forklift off a loading dock, and who’d already had one DUI arrest that week. It was a brushed steel bell, and on the right setting it could scour the hide off a rhino at fifty paces. I had it dialed to something more gentle on Thursday evening—no more than a mild sandstorm—and I’d been under for twenty minutes, washing away a long day of people with lice in their hair, voices in their heads, a host of untreated chronic diseases, and a miscellany of maimings and acute infections. I’d been riding a wave of adrenaline and caffeine since early morning, and if I could muster enough energy to turn off the water, I wanted nothing more afterward than to crawl into my bed. But that, I knew, wasn’t going to happen. Sutter would be by any minute.
Through a supreme act of will, I spun the handles and climbed out of the shower. I toweled off and pulled on a clean shirt and pair of jeans, and while I was buttoning these I once again looked over the package Anne Crane had sent.
It had arrived this afternoon, with a bound transcript of Elena’s statement inside, along with a DVD of her making the statement, a sheet of paper with a URL and password to the online version of the video, a flash drive with excerpts, and a handwritten note from Anne in her neat, Catholic-school script. Check out the highlight reel. Four stars—impossible not to take her seriously.
I’d watched a few minutes of excerpts between patients, and I watched a few minutes more as I slipped into loafers and buckled my belt. Elena looked young and vulnerable on the laptop monitor. Her skin was pale against the blue of her dress, and faint blue veins were visible in her neck. Her eyes were guileless and shy, and her voice was flat. Her speech was clear, even with her accent, and the accent was endearing, and somehow lent credibility to what she said. I agreed with Anne Crane’s review, and hoped the Brays would too. My phone chirped with a text message from Sutter; he was in the alley. I took a bulky yellow legal-sized envelope from the table, and walked downstairs.
Sutter was waiting in another new car—a Lexus RX, in steel gray with smoked glass.
“Where do you get these cars?” I said as he drove down the alley.
“This came from the guy who bought my Simi Valley house. He didn’t have all the cash, so he threw in the car. I’m gonna give it to my moms, I think—her Audi’s getting raggedy, and she’ll like the color.”
“Plus, there are no bullet holes in it. Yet.”
“Let’s hope we don’t pick up any where we’re headed tonight.”
&nbs
p; “And where’s that?”
“Not far. Siggy just bought himself a lounge downtown—one of those speakeasy theme parks, with artisanal cocktails and ice made from unicorn piss and middle-aged dudes from the Westside playing Humphrey Bogart.”
“That doesn’t narrow it much.”
Sutter laughed. “I guess not. It’s called Lacquer.” He glanced at the envelope in my lap. “That the cash?” he asked.
I nodded. “A hundred thousand doesn’t take up much space.”
Lacquer was on Sixth Street, near Main, and as Sutter drove past he tilted his head at a silver Bentley moored in a no-parking zone at the mouth of an alley. There was a big guy in a dark suit leaning on the driver’s door, smoking.
“You like Siggy’s ride? His wife’s got a matching one in gold.”
“Classy.”
“Nothing but,” Sutter said. He parked on the street, a few doors away. He pulled a backpack from behind the driver’s seat and held it open.
“Drop the cash in there,” he said. I did, and we climbed from the Lexus. Sutter locked the car with a remote and spun the key ring on his finger.
The entrance to Lacquer was down an alley, through a metal door beneath a caged lightbulb. Inside was a velvet-lined hallway with a hostess at the end—a sullen redhead in a green silk slip dress, who had a rascally cat tattooed a few inches north of her left nipple. Sutter grinned and coaxed a flickering smile in return. Before she could say good evening, or anything else, two large shapes stepped in front of her podium.
There was a blond guy with cauliflower ears, and a blonder guy with a neck like a fireplug. They knew Sutter, and moved cautiously around him.
“You here to drink, or what?” fireplug asked. His accent was more Oxnard than Moscow.
Sutter laughed. “Are you taking cocktail orders now, Stevie? That’s a step up.”
Stevie ignored the remark. He pointed at the backpack. “What’s in the bag?”
“It’s for Siggy,” Sutter said.
Cauliflower shook his massive head. “We gotta check.”
Sutter lifted the pack from his shoulder and tossed it to Cauliflower. “Sure. But you open it, you guarantee the count to Siggy.”
Dr. Knox Page 24