Assume Nothing

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  Baumhower saw the change in him and was justifiably alarmed by it. He’d been holding out the faint hope that telling Reddick what he wanted to know, without making any effort to save himself, would appease the man enough to spare his life. But now he wasn’t so sure. Now, Reddick was looking at him like the only thing he had left to decide was where in Baumhower’s body he should put the first bullet.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Baumhower asked, voice quavering.

  Contrary to what his hostage thought, Reddick had yet to make up his mind. His intent all along, insofar as his premeditation went, was to question Baumhower only long enough to learn Clarke’s identity and what secret he and Baumhower were so desperate to hide, then kill them both. Not to exact revenge or dispense justice, but to remove them as a threat to the people he loved in the most certain and permanent way possible. But now the game had changed; he had four people to worry about, not just two, and he might need to keep Baumhower alive, at least for a while, to get to the other three.

  Reddick stood up and ordered Baumhower to do the same.

  ‘Please. What are you going to do?’ Baumhower asked again, getting slowly to his feet.

  ‘I heard you the first time. Shut up and let’s go,’ Reddick said. He waved his gun at the door.

  It wasn’t the answer Baumhower wanted to hear. He had convinced himself that Reddick was going to kill him, no matter what he did, and the only reason he could think Reddick might have to take him out of the house was to do it somewhere remote, where no one would hear the shots and his body would neither soon nor easily be found.

  ‘No,’ Baumhower said. It had taken all the courage he could muster.

  Reddick grimaced, his patience wearing thin. ‘One way or another, you’re going out that door,’ he said. ‘By your own power or mine, it makes no difference to me.’

  ‘I think you’re forgetting something, aren’t you? What Ben told you? If anything happens to me, your wife and little boy are dead.’

  He hadn’t meant it as a personal threat. It was just a last ditch effort to save himself. But Baumhower could not have miscalculated any worse. Reminding Reddick of Clarke, and the promises of death the big man had made to Reddick the day before, did nothing but snap his tenuous hold on reason like a twig. In a single instant, any rationale Reddick may have had for keeping Baumhower alive was erased from his mind.

  If anything happens to me, your wife and little boy are dead.

  Recognizing his mistake immediately, all Baumhower had time to do was watch Reddick point the gun at his face and pull the trigger.

  FOURTEEN

  At Cross’s insistence, he and Ben Clarke had dinner Saturday night at Koi in West Hollywood. Clarke hated sushi and wanted to dine at Nightshades, his club in Santa Monica, within the familiar and noisy confines of his private office overlooking the dance floor, but Cross wouldn’t hear of it. He was in a somber frame of mind and had no interest in trying to talk to Clarke amid the hedonistic trappings of one of his clubs.

  They sat at a booth in the darkest of four dining rooms, candlelight casting bands of shadow across the walls, Cross eating avocado rolls and Yellowtail sashimi with gusto, Clarke picking at a bowl of white rice and roasted duck like a kid searching for a live bug. Neither paid any attention to the A-list celebrities occupying various other booths in the room, Cross because he didn’t give a damn and Clarke simply too miserable to notice.

  ‘Try him again,’ Cross said.

  ‘Fuck that. We’ve tried him three times already, he ain’t gonna answer the phone.’

  ‘He will eventually. He has to. Try him again.’

  Clarke glowered at him but Cross wasn’t looking, too intent on eating to raise his eyes from his plate. Clarke thumbed the redial button on his phone one more time, listened as the call rang through yet again to Andy Baumhower’s voicemail.

  ‘Voicemail,’ he said, tossing the phone aside to bounce with a clang off his water glass. ‘What’d I tell you?’

  Cross shook his head, facing Clarke directly now. ‘I don’t like it, Ben.’

  ‘You don’t like what?’

  ‘I can see how he might want to avoid talking to me, but you? Why shouldn’t he want to talk to you?’

  ‘Who said he doesn’t want to talk to either one of us? So Andy’s not answering his voicemail. Man could be catching a movie or something. He could be someplace where he can’t have his ringer on, or just can’t hear it.’

  He was reaching and he knew it. Baumhower had been AWOL now for going on two hours and Clarke didn’t need Cross to tell him how unlike their friend this was. Cell phone, email, online social network – it didn’t matter. Baumhower was fucking OCD when it came to answering every message left for him in thirty minutes or less, rain or shine.

  He didn’t want to panic, but Clarke was beginning to think the worst. As was Cross, obviously. Clarke had told him over appetizers what he’d done the day before to Reddick and his family, making it all sound like the only move a wise man could have made. The news enraged Cross, no surprise, but not to the vitriolic level Clarke had been expecting. Instead, Cross took it with surprising calm, betraying more in the way of bemused astonishment than unadulterated outrage. He considered what Clarke had done to be unbelievably stupid, and he said so, but he confessed to a mild suspicion that it could lead to the desired result, nevertheless. It all depended on Reddick, Cross said, and whether or not he would take Clarke’s threats to heart and scare.

  Having never laid eyes on Reddick himself, he asked Clarke for his opinion.

  ‘The last time I saw him,’ Clarke said, teeth bared in a crooked smile, ‘he was all curled up in a ball on the floor, crying like a little bitch. He’s gonna scare, all right.’

  He was neglecting to mention, of course, all the other things he had seen in Reddick aside from simple fear: pain, anger, confusion – and frothing, violent, wild-eyed madness, the kind most commonly found in padded rooms. Whether this last made Reddick more or less likely to follow his instructions, Clarke didn’t know, but he thought he could guess how Cross would feel about it. Cross would see it as a bad omen.

  Which was precisely how he was taking Baumhower’s state of incommunicado now. The timing of it bothered him. Maybe, as Clarke would have him believe, there were explanations for Baumhower choosing this moment to go uncharacteristically silent that had nothing to do with Joe Reddick, but until he heard them from Baumhower himself, Cross was going to operate as if all hell was about to break loose.

  ‘Get Will back on the phone,’ he said. ‘Tell him to go by Andy’s crib and check on him. Right away.’

  ‘And if he wants to know why?’

  They’d talked to Sinnott once already tonight to ask if he’d heard from Baumhower recently, but they hadn’t told him anything about why they were asking.

  ‘Just tell him Andy looked like shit when you saw him this morning and we want to make sure he’s OK.’

  ‘And he’s supposed to believe that?’

  ‘Hell, Ben, I don’t care if he believes it or not. Just get Will over to Andy’s, all right?’

  The only thing Clarke had a mind to do was tip the table over on to Cross’s lap and walk the fuck out. He was sick of Cross’s Jap food and tired of his orders, and the creeping fear that Baumhower had grown quiet because he was gone – halfway to Belgium or Israel or God-knew-where by now in some pointless, idiotic flight from the authorities – was burning a hole in Clarke’s gut from the inside out. But because Cross was right, because it only made sense to send Will out to Andy’s place to see what the fuck was going on, he kept his seat in the booth and made the call.

  As he predicted, Sinnott wouldn’t go without asking a host of questions first. Clarke told him he and Cross were concerned about Baumhower because he’d been talking about turning himself in to the police, convinced that the discovery of Gillis Rainey’s body was bound to lead them to his door any minute. It was a lie not too far from the truth, and it did the trick; duly alarmed, Sinnott
couldn’t get off the phone fast enough to go check on Baumhower as requested.

  Sinnott had a house up in the hills of Encino, less than a twenty-minute drive from Baumhower’s place in Chatsworth. Cross and Clarke ordered fresh drinks while they waited for Sinnott to report back, making small talk neither really wanted to hear just to fill the time. When, thirty minutes later, it was Cross’s phone that rang instead of Clarke’s, they both had the same thought at once.

  Sinnott wasn’t calling to say that all was well.

  They found him sitting in the dark interior of his car out front, his face as white as an albino Koi. An open flask of brandy was in his lap, standing upright between his thighs. They could tell just from the smell of the car that the flask had long been empty.

  ‘I can’t go back in there,’ Sinnott said.

  All they’d been able to get out of him over the phone was that Andy was dead, and that they needed to get their asses over there right away. Cross told him not to call anyone else – especially not the police – and to stay put until they arrived.

  The front door was ajar when they reached the porch, presumably as it had been upon Sinnott’s arrival. Clarke led the way inside, gesturing for Cross to avoid touching anything. The house was dark except for a room off in the back, the one both of Baumhower’s friends recognized as his home office. They crept to the open door and were greeted by the sight of Baumhower’s body, sprawled out on the floor above a pool of his own blood. One eye was open and the other was simply gone, replaced by a black, red-rimmed hole.

  ‘Fuck!’ Clarke said.

  They entered the room and looked around, trying to piece together the circumstances of Baumhower’s death. As near as either man could tell, his killer had left little in the way of evidence behind. Everything in the room seemed to be in its proper place, exactly as they remembered it. Except:

  ‘Where’s his MacBook?’ Cross asked.

  The black laptop Baumhower never went anywhere without was absent from its usual perch atop his desk. Cross and Clarke canvassed the room, checking every inch of the floor and the surfaces of furniture, and saw no sign of the computer anywhere.

  ‘Maybe he put it down somewhere on his way in,’ Clarke said.

  They went back to the front of the house and looked, starting in the hallway, then moving on to the kitchen, where Baumhower would have first entered from the garage. They scanned end tables and countertops, all the places Baumhower might have laid the laptop before retreating to his office.

  The MacBook wasn’t there.

  ‘Ben, look.’

  Clarke turned, squinted in the dark to see Cross standing in the living room next to a big-screen TV that appeared to be hanging by a thread from one wall. A phalanx of power and A/V cables that should have been plugged into its back sprouted in a loose jumble from a hole in the wall above it, some showing signs of having been ripped from their connectors by force. As Clarke drew closer, he could see that the display itself had been similarly torn away from its bracket, a de-installation job done in haste and left woefully incomplete.

  ‘What do you think?’ Cross asked.

  ‘I think we should take a good look around, see if anything else is missing besides Andy’s MacBook,’ Clarke said.

  They split up and worked quickly, going from room to room, elbowing light switches on and off to avoid leaving fingerprints behind. Nothing glaring stood out in its absence, but they found every drawer in an armoire and dresser in Baumhower’s bedroom yanked open, and a leather jewelry box that lay empty and turned on its head atop his bedside table. When Cross went back to Baumhower’s office, Clarke was gingerly going through the dead man’s pockets.

  ‘His wallet’s gone and so’s his cell phone,’ Clarke said. ‘There’s no cash on him, either.’

  ‘So . . .’

  ‘You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?’

  ‘Looks like the poor bastard walked in on somebody jacking the place.’

  ‘Exactly. TV, MacBook, cash and credit cards . . . What else could’ve happened?’ Clarke’s sense of relief almost brought a smile to his face.

  ‘You don’t think this could’ve been Reddick?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe he killed Andy and set everything up to look like a burglary. That’s possible, isn’t it?’

  ‘Possible? Anything’s possible. But Reddick didn’t do this. Who the fuck do you think he is, James Bond?’

  ‘You’ve met him, I haven’t. You tell me.’

  ‘I already did. Reddick’s under control. He ain’t got the balls to go to the cops, and he sure as hell ain’t got enough to do all this. Gimme a break.’

  Cross fell silent as if convinced, but Clarke knew he still had his doubts. Remembering the convulsing, howling wild man Reddick had been the last time he’d seen him, Clarke only halfway believed what he was saying himself.

  ‘And if you’re wrong?’ Cross asked finally. ‘If he left his prints all over this house and they lead the cops directly to him? He could ruin us all, Ben.’

  ‘He could. But he won’t.’

  ‘There’s only one way to really be sure about that, though, isn’t there?’

  He waited for Clarke to return his look and properly interpret it. It didn’t take long.

  ‘No problem,’ Clarke said.

  They both turned at what sounded like a small whimper, discovered Sinnott listing to one side in the open doorway, holding back tears with no success whatsoever.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Who are we planning to kill now?’

  Reddick couldn’t remember killing Baumhower. His memory was just a cold, black hole in the moments before he found himself down on one knee, checking Baumhower’s body for a pulse he knew wasn’t there.

  He’d grabbed everything he could carry that he thought might be helpful in running down the dead man’s three partners – his wallet, laptop computer, and cell phone – and then did a rush job of doctoring the scene to resemble a home burglary interrupted, acting on sudden inspiration. There was only one course of action for him to take now – find Baumhower’s trio of friends, starting with Ben Clarke, and kill them all post haste – and every second he could keep them guessing about his intentions would be critical to his success. If they realized too soon he was coming for them, they’d likely scatter to the four winds, and the lives of his wife and child would remain in the very state of peril he was seeking to render impossible.

  Retreating to his Echo Park apartment, Reddick gathered Baumhower’s things together on a dining room table and subjected them to a thorough inspection, working through a haze of guilt that kept threatening to overwhelm him. He was a murderer now, pure and simple, someone who had taken another man’s life without the excuse of professional duty or self-defense, and it was going to take Reddick some time to get used to the idea. Time he didn’t really have, because he had yet more killing to do, and remorse would only get in the way. He had to keep reminding himself that none of this had been of his own choosing, that fate had thrown him and Baumhower together through no fault of his own. He wasn’t an evil man, just an astoundingly unfortunate one, and whatever damage he was destined to do in the days to come he could not be held accountable for.

  Baumhower’s iPhone was a wealth of information, an unsecured storehouse of names and phone numbers, addresses and notes, but Reddick knew the data on the dead man’s laptop would be far more useful to him. Almost as if to prove the point, the black MacBook booted up to a login screen and no further, demanding a username and password Baumhower’s phone had not. Reddick would have been done had he been forced to rely on his skills as a hacker to proceed; short of trying the most obvious and inane username/password combinations imaginable, he would have had no clue how to go about determining the right one.

  But Baumhower, it seemed, had been nothing if not consistent, and so had treated computer security with the same ineffectual lack of sophistication he had shown in securing his home. Reddick had managed to successfully break into Baumhower’
s residence in part because the dead man had left all the pertinent passcode info regarding his home security system on a note in a kitchen drawer for Reddick to find, allowing him to kill the alarm and assure the security firm that had installed it all was well when a dispatcher officer called the house to investigate. Now Reddick was relieved to discover that Baumhower had stored a similar note-to-self regarding his MacBook login in the memo section of his unsecured phone. It was a lucky break, certainly, but Reddick knew it was also an error all too typical of people like Baumhower, jittery milquetoasts afraid to trust critical information to the vagaries of memory.

  Reddick entered the correct username and password – a predictably inane ‘Primerider1’/‘UCLA2007’ – and watched as the laptop booted up completely. He did a quick inventory of the files on its hard drive, opening only enough to become satisfied the MacBook was indeed the fount of information on Baumhower and his Class Act friends he’d been hoping for, then shut the machine back down. He would examine the files in detail later, taking copious notes, but right now he wanted to check in on Dana and Jake before they bedded down for the night. His wife’s voice would serve as a reminder of what he was fighting for and give him the strength to go on, even if by talking to her so soon after Baumhower’s death, he ran the risk of somehow revealing to her what he’d done.