On the bureau was a small plastic sandwich bag with some yellowish powder in it. High odds that was meth. I wasn’t surprised to see Courtney used it. One thing Anne had told me was that meth was extremely popular with actresses and models, because one of the best known side effects of the drug was that the user lost interest in eating. In a business where staying skinny was the primary measure of a woman’s value, a drug that could help with that was the Holy Grail, no matter the side effects.
She saw where I was looking. “You want some?”
“Absolutely not.” I didn’t even want to be in the room with it.
The noise of a motorcycle revving in the parking lot shook the room’s window.
“Let’s get this over with.”
“Where’s my purse and keys?” she demanded.
I’d forgotten them in the car. Talk first, then I’d go get them. “Why do you even want to be involved in Roger’s lawsuit anyhow?” I asked.
The motorcycle whined, then stopped, then became louder again.
“You’d better be a sound sleeper, or you’re not going to get any sleep tonight,” I said.
“Aren’t you sweet to be thinking of my needs?”
“Thinking of mine, actually. Could you close the curtains?”
She grunted at me and turned to pull the curtains closed.
The motorcycle stopped outside Courtney’s window.
Its rider was all in black: black leather pants, a black leather jacket with chrome zippers, and a black helmet, its black face visor in the down position. Which seemed odd, given that it was dusk. Who rode around with the visor down at night?
For that matter, who rode their cycle on a sidewalk?
The motorcyclist raised his hand.
It took me a moment to realize the hand had a gun in it. And it was aimed right in the gap between the security grate and the AC unit.
“Down!” I yelled. I hit the floor as the window exploded. I rolled over and wedged myself up against the side of the bed and kept my eyes shut to avoid flying glass.
If I counted right, the gun fired five times.
Somewhere between the crown of my head and the window I heard Courtney land with a thump on the carpeting. She made a gurgling noise.
From my position on the side of the bed, all I could see was Courtney’s hair. I reached through and picked up the corner of the bedspread. She was lying on the carpet, her face turned away from me. The back of her head was a bloody, twisted mess.
“Courtney?” I said.
She didn’t respond.
“Courtney!”
Nothing. No movement. No more noises.
No more gunshots, either, so that was a positive note.
A series of rapid blows on the door to the motel room yanked my attention away from Courtney to the door behind me. I could see the In Case Of Fire instructions shake in their little plastic holder on the door. “Who’s in there?” yelled the man’s voice.
I couldn’t tell who it was. Maybe had a Hispanic accent, but I couldn’t concentrate on the sound long enough to figure it out.
Through the window I heard someone shouting and the screech of tires on asphalt. And in the room the AC unit was making a loud sputtering noise.
The door into the room bowed under the blows from outside.
Courtney still wasn’t making a sound. From the looks of what was left of her head, she wouldn’t be, ever again.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed 911. Through the open motel window, I could hear sirens off in the distance, but in this part of Los Angeles they might simply be background noise.
The 911 system put me on hold.
Holy Hera. I really needed them to answer, now.
The only way out of the room was through that door, where someone was wailing on it something fierce. Might be someone to help. Might be someone to finish the job. Or maybe I could go the other way, through the broken window, but right now I didn’t feel like risking it.
The hammering on the door intensified. The In Case Of Fire announcement kept pulsing in response to the blows. The white plastic Do Not Disturb sign kept flapping up and down, keeping time. From my position behind the bed I stared at the stupid, meaningless icon printed at the bottom of it, a drawing of a cat wearing a top hat while snoozing on top of a motel. I knew I would have to tell them where I was and for the life of me, I couldn’t remember. Somewhere in North Hollywood, in a horrible, dirty little motel. I did not want to die in a terrible motel.
“Nine one one,” said the operator.
“There’s been a shooting.” I added extra waver to my voice to indicate anxiety. My past experience with violence sometimes renders me a little too calm in these situations.
“What’s your location?”
I looked at the cat wearing a top hat.
“The Motornight Motel,” I said. “Something like that. It’s on Lankershim. I think. I can’t even remember.”
“Are you somewhere safe?”
“No, dammit, someone has been shooting at me! And someone’s trying to break in to this room! And I think someone’s dead.”
Through the window a crowd of people had started gathering. Maybe they were pointing at Courtney. I didn’t want to know.
“Which room are you in?”
“It’ll be obvious.”
“Is anyone hurt?”
“Someone got shot. She’s bleeding.”
“Can you get somewhere safe?”
The bathroom looked like the safest bet. Yet another door to get through, smaller, easier to defend. On the other hand, I’d be cornered if anyone came looking for me with a vengeance or a handgun. None of this boded well for the quality of my life expectancy at the moment.
“Yes,” I said.
“Stay there until the police arrive.”
I went into the bathroom, which was tiny and ancient. There was a simple sink counter, with no shelves underneath it. Two plastic cups for drinking. A toilet. A pair of thin bath towels. The shower was a small plastic corner unit, separated from the rest of the room with a plastic shower curtain.
A curtain that ran around a metal rod.
I yanked the shower curtain off the rod, tugging as hard as I could to loosen where the rod was bolted into the wall. My arms ached with every pull. The bolts moved, which said something about the age of the plaster on the walls. When the shower curtain was free, I jabbed the metal rings into the top edge of the crappy, low-rent bathroom mirror and opened the bathroom door long enough to drape part of it across the jamb. Then I closed the door again and spread the plastic curtain across the doorway. Anybody coming through that door was going to be confused for a moment by running into a sheet of plastic.
After that was secure, I grabbed the curtain rod and hung from it with my full weight, my shoulders aching and my bruised stomach muscles vibrating under the strain, feeling as though they were peeling apart, strand by strand. The rod bowed slightly but didn’t bend or yank out of the wall.
“C’mon, dammit,” I muttered. I would allow myself to cry after I had completely failed.
I held on and kicked my feet out to the toilet, gripping on to the sides of the bowl with my shoes.
The added force pulled the rod out of the wall and I crashed down to the floor, the metal rod missing my face by a few centimeters. The slam against the floor shot through my body like a bolt of pure white pain.
If the person coming through that door didn’t succeed in killing me, I absolutely was going to take a few days holiday and not move a muscle.
But now I had a metal rod in my hands, and I could wait for whoever was coming through that door.
Waiting there gave me time to consider what the hell had just happened.
The best case scenario—and I couldn’t believe those words came to my mind as I waited—was that this had been a case of mistaken identity and the shooter meant to get someone else. North Hollywood undoubtedly had its share of violence and drug trafficking, so maybe we’d drawn the short straw
. Los Angeles had fewer murders these days, not no murders.
If Roger was the killer, he had had plenty of time to get to me during my walk around the block. And of course, he’d have had plenty of opportunities to kill Courtney whenever he wanted.
I kept seeing the two of us standing in the room, nowhere near one another, and no one could confuse one of us for the other. So if the shooter had meant to kill one of us, Courtney was definitely the target.
I wedged the metal rod between the door and the base of the toilet, banging it a few times with my hand to make sure it was firmly stuck in place.
How did a minor celebrity from a stupid reality TV show end up as the target of someone with a gun?
I sat back in the shower stall and waited to find out.
CHAPTER NINE
HOW LONG HAD I been in that bathroom? I had no idea.
Through the door I could hear voices, banging, police sirens in the distance. They got louder. I assumed they were headed to the motel.
My spot was in the shower. I stayed there.
Someone rattled the doorknob on the bathroom and yelled, “Who’s in there? Who’s in there, goddammit?”
I didn’t recognize the voice. Maybe the motel manager. Maybe a cop. I didn’t say anything.
The door to the bathroom bowed inward a few times, like someone was trying to bang it open. My improvised barrier held despite the cheap construction of the components, but the door to the bathroom was right across from the wall of the closet, meaning someone trying to bust down the door in here couldn’t get a running start.
My cell phone vibrated against my hip. When I pulled it out, I licked my lips and discovered my tongue was dry. I’d been waiting to react for so long—somewhere between ten minutes and two hours.
I couldn’t concentrate hard enough to resolve the various letters into words, but the pattern of words on the screen was easy enough to figure out with a glance: Det. Samuel Gruen.
“Hello?” I said.
“Are you in the bathroom?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Are you hurt?”
I did a body scan. I’d probably bruised myself getting the shower rod and my side hurt like hell, but other than that.... “No, I’m all right.”
“Can you open the door?”
“Yes.”
“Then open the door.”
A quick series of tugs on the metal shower rod told me I’d done a better job barricading the door than I expected. My upper body still hurt from the fall I’d taken getting the shower rod out of the wall, so I swung my legs around and kicked the metal bar as hard as I could. It took a number of sharp, vicious jabs before it finally gave way—and my body lurched forward at the same time.
Ow.
The metal rod clanged as it rolled under the sink counter. When I stood, I was shakier than I’d expected myself to be. It took two hands gripped on the doorknob and a thorough pull to get the door unstuck. The plastic shower curtain had created a tight seal around the frame. Nice.
Detective Gruen was right outside the door, his face a mixture of concern and suspicion. He had his jacket drawn back, ready to grab a weapon. Once I had opened the door, he pushed it open all the way, checking out the rest of the bathroom.
“Is Courtney dead?” I asked quietly.
“Yes,” he said. His hand gripped my arm and he led me out of the bathroom, into the tiny hallway of the motel room. A pair of techs in blue windbreakers with large easy-to-read yellow letters spelling out LAPD on the back were bent over the spot where Courtney had been lying face-down. Gruen directed me out the door, to where a passel of cops were holding back lookie-loos. I hoped no one took my picture and posted it on the Internet as a possible suspect.
Gruen led me down the walkway, past the cement pool area, to the front of the motel. There was an ambulance waiting there, the rotating red flashers lighting up the fronts of all the nearby buildings and the sides of parked cars.
“You hurt?” he asked.
“You already asked me that.”
“Maybe the endorphins have worn off,” he said.
The paramedic, a pudgy Hispanic woman wearing latex gloves, used a flashlight to check my vision.
“She’s been hurt recently,” Gruen told her.
I pulled up my shirt so the woman could check my bandage. “Seems okay,” she said. “A little bleeding.” She dabbed some kind of ointment on it.
“You were there when it happened?” Gruen asked.
“I have to call Ross.”
“You don’t have to call your lawyer for this.”
“Trust me when I say, I absolutely do, yes.”
“You were inside the room, right? Well, the shooter was outside the room. What’s the problem?”
Cops. They’re so cute when they’re deliberately overlooking the obvious. I was present when a homicide occurred. He could tell me anything he wanted to right now, perfectly legally. He wasn’t the one who filed charges, after all.
I ignored him and took my phone out.
Gruen was doing his job. I also reminded myself that he didn’t necessarily need me to help him. What I needed right then was Nathaniel to show up and do his job, which was to protect me from Gruen doing his.
“You didn’t call him while you were in there?” Gruen asked.
My laugh surprised even me. “I didn’t even think of it. I was mostly waiting for someone to burst through the door and kill me.”
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I was a million miles from okay. I nodded and said, “Just shaken up.”
As I hit the auto-dial for Nathaniel’s cell phone, I wasn’t thinking about Courtney or about the fact that someone out there had decided murder was the best solution to whatever their problems were. No, all I could think about was that getting involved in another murder was exactly the sort of leverage Roberto needed to stop listening to any of my objections and yank me out of Los Angeles.
* * *
As soon as Nathaniel arrived, he separated me from the paramedics and Detective Gruen and brought me over to his Mercedes sedan. Again in the passenger seat, for the second time that week. Nathaniel was not only my lawyer, but he had a lucrative second gig going as my chauffeur. I ran my hands over the seats, feeling the smooth, tough surface of the leather. The leather of the seats in my mother’s car had been softer, more like lambskin than this. If I remembered the seats correctly. Were they specially made seats, or did I have a faulty memory?
Nathaniel got into the driver’s seat before using his fingertips to turn my head so I had to look at him. He stared into my eyes, as though he could diagnose a concussion by looking at it.
“How are you?” he asked.
Practically speaking, I was fine. The adrenaline was fading. My muscles were loosening from their clenched, ready position. The sudden shock of Courtney’s murder was draining away. “Fine. I wasn’t hurt.”
“Jesus, Dru, someone got murdered in front of you. How are you?”
Not exactly the first time that’s happened to me, I thought. The better part of valor decreed I refrain from saying that aloud. Perhaps my immediate downcast gaze got the point across. I turned away from him and went back to staring through the front windshield at the ambulance’s flashing lights. “I didn’t get shot or hit by the glass. I’m okay.”
Ross shook his head.
I cleared my throat and looked up again. “The detective wants me to tell him what happened. He says it’s obvious I wasn’t the perpetrator.”
“Were you in the room?” Nathaniel asked. He waited for me to nod. “Were there drugs in the room? You were angry at her, weren’t you? Wasn’t she present at an assault you were involved in? Didn’t she sign an affidavit saying you caused it? Did you want to get back at her for that? What about the restraining order? Do you know how to fire a weapon? Did you try to help Courtney once she’d been shot or did you let her bleed out? Did you see who did fire the gun? Was it a man or woman? Are you certain of that? Is there any reaso
n you might want to aid the perpetrator and hinder their investigation?”
It wasn’t hard to figure out where he was going with those questions.
“The only response to these questions is invoking your fifth amendment rights. We’re not doing that. It’s great to hear they’re sure you didn’t pull the trigger. No, you’re not talking to the cops. Don’t say a goddamn thing.”
Don’t say a goddamn thing.
I put my hand over his on the steering wheel. He pulled away from me like I had leprosy. It showed good sense on his part. I understood that. “That goes for you, too.”
“What?”
“Please don’t say anything about this.”
“Drusilla, I’m your lawyer. I don’t say things.”
“To Roberto. Don’t say anything to Roberto.”
Nathaniel was silent, the lights outside flashing off his blond hair. “You know I can’t promise that.”
“Please. For a while. A couple of days. Give the police two or three days to find who did this, and it’ll wrap up, and he doesn’t need to know.”
His brown eyes were in shadow and I couldn’t read them at all. “He’s going to find out. Better coming from me.”
“He will make me leave Los Angeles and leave Stevie. And Zeus knows she’s not ready for that.”
“Why do you do that?”
“What? Why do I dance to his tune? Same reason we all do.”
“No. The whole Zeus thing. Sometimes you say Hades. Once I think you said Freya. It’s weird.”
Of all the things Nathaniel could have asked about at that moment. It certainly derailed my earnest pleading. I had to think about where that habit had started from. “My sister likes to think we’re High Church Anglicans. The sort of people who wouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain. So I take other names in vain. Doing it all the time makes it easier not to do it in front of her. Because normally I’m about thirty seconds from a full-on Tourette’s explosion.”
He had to smother the laugh that was trying to sneak out. “Your sister’s a weird one.”
And there it was. My best shot for getting Nathaniel to understand what I was up against with my family, with Stevie, with my whole damned life. I grabbed him by the arm. “Yes, she is, Nathaniel. She is. And it’s clear I’ve helped do that to her. I know that. But Roberto wants me to leave her and I can’t. Not yet. She’s not ready to be on her own. If he finds out I’m involved in another murder I will disappear tomorrow.”
Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) Page 9