Assume Nothing

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  Cross, meanwhile, stayed behind to clean up his condo and try to make contact with Iris, hoping Reddick had let her go once his escape from Cross’s place had been complete. Getting hold of Iris in any case wouldn’t be easy, however, because she didn’t have her phone; Cross had taken it away from her when she’d tried to call 911 for Clarke and it was still in his possession. He tried her at home and only got voicemail.

  He knew he should call the police for her sake alone but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Reddick in police custody was the last thing he needed. As accomplished a liar as he was, Cross couldn’t imagine how he and the others might spin a lie for the authorities that could explain away everything Reddick would tell them. Rainey’s kidnapping and death, Andy’s dumping of his body, Clarke’s assault upon Reddick’s family – all would be revealed if the police got involved and found Reddick alive and conversant. Better to let them find out about Iris’s kidnapping either on their own, or with Iris’s help if she was still alive, than make the call himself. And it would be better still if they never found out about it at all.

  If he could contact Iris before she filed a report, he might be able to keep a lid on things, but he couldn’t reach her. He tried her at home three times, then gave up. He had no choice now but to plan for the worst. He went to work scrubbing every trace of Clarke’s blood from his condo and tried to think of a story to tell the authorities that could counter anything Iris might choose to offer.

  It took him about twenty minutes to come up with something suitable.

  Iris was a mess.

  She’d just been kidnapped and released by a stranger with a gun who’d all but admitted to murdering Andy Baumhower. The man who’d been her fiancé only two days before, along with his two closest friends, were very possibly murderers themselves. Her car was parked less than a block from Perry’s home, her wallet and ID were still somewhere inside, and now Perry had her cell phone and – unless she’d lost them somewhere else – her car keys, too.

  Walking on shaky legs in the general direction of Perry’s condo, she knew intellectually that calling the police was a no-brainer. In spite of her kidnapper’s request that she do otherwise, it seemed like the only sane thing to do. Guns were being waved around, Ben Clarke had been badly beaten, and two other people, ostensibly, were dead. But she was afraid to make the call. She had the feeling doing so would prove to be a terrible mistake, the catalyst for a host of unintended and irreversible consequences, and try as she might, she couldn’t shake it.

  What could she tell the police, in any case, that would make any sense?

  Only Perry knew what the hell was really going on, and she wanted to understand it all herself before she did anything that couldn’t be undone. She wondered if Perry, given the chance, could put everything that had happened today and yesterday in some kind of order that would prove none of it was as sinister as it seemed. He wasn’t a murderer and the man in the Mustang was simply delusional; Gillis Rainey had died of natural causes and so had Andy Baumhower.

  No. She knew better than to hold out such a hope.

  Whatever the truth was, Iris was sure it was ugly and terrifying, and nothing Perry could say would convince her otherwise. She had come to see her ex-fiancé in an entirely different light since discovering the check he’d forged two days ago in her name, and he scared her now. More so, even, than the man who had dragged her out of his condo at gunpoint this morning and abandoned her in the middle of the street.

  That man was a total stranger to her, yet, much to her amazement, she found herself believing everything he had told her. Rather than ‘crazy’ – Perry’s word – he had struck her as wounded and enraged, two things any man would be had his family been physically abused and threatened with death by a mindless thug like Ben Clarke, as the stranger had claimed was the case. He was far from harmless, to be sure; she wasn’t so confused as to be blind to the damage he could do to others, given the proper motivation. But he wasn’t a mindless killer, either. The fact that he had let her go, unharmed, when killing her would have guaranteed him the twenty-four hours of freedom he’d simply asked her for, seemed proof enough of that.

  Iris didn’t owe the man anything. She had promised him nothing. If she called the police now and, in the end, he was the only one to get hurt, she would have little reason to feel guilty about it.

  And yet she knew she would just the same.

  Cross joined Clarke and Sinnott at St John’s Hospital just as Clarke was being released. The big man looked like shit and, when he tried to speak, sounded worse. His mouth was full of gauze and his head was wrapped in a skull-cap of white. Even sitting in one of the waiting room chairs, he moved as if every breath incurred more pain than he could bear.

  The first thing he said to Cross was, ‘That fucker’s dead.’

  Same old Ben Clarke.

  Sinnott ran down the official list of his injuries for Cross’s edification: moderate concussion, four broken teeth, one cracked rib, and multiple upper body contusions. The doctors had wanted to hold him overnight for observation but were assured Clarke would only crawl out of bed and flee at his first opportunity if they pressed the issue, so they reluctantly let him go instead, a fistful of pain meds in hand.

  The short walk to Cross’s car out in the carport seemed to take forever, he and Sinnott guiding Clarke along like a blind man with one foot in a cast. Cross drove the three of them into the parking structure where they sat for a while in a space next to Sinnott’s Acura. The building was dark and cool and made for an ideal place to bring Clarke up to speed and discuss their next move.

  ‘Do you think she’ll go to the police?’ Sinnott asked from the back seat of Cross’s Escalade, referring to Iris.

  ‘If she isn’t dead? I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t,’ Cross said. ‘Assuming he’s let her go, anyway.’

  ‘He must have let her go. We’re the ones he wants dead, not her.’

  ‘True. But this fucker Joe Reddick’s pretty sharp. He might get the bright idea to hold on to her as leverage, something to offer us – or me, anyway – in exchange for a meeting.’

  ‘Except it’s been, what? Almost three hours since he took her? Surely we would have heard from him by now if that was what he was going to do.’

  Cross shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Christ,’ Sinnott said, burying his face in his hands. ‘I need a drink. If he does let her go and she runs to the cops—’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ve already figured that part out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By coming up with a story that will be better than hers. Because think about it: What can she can tell them that will make an ounce of sense? And she won’t be able to prove a word of it, in any case.’

  ‘Unless the asshole’s told her everything,’ Clarke said. Up to now he’d remained silent, either content to let Cross and Sinnott go at it alone, or in too much pain to intervene.

  ‘Everything?’ Cross turned to look at him.

  ‘Gillis, Andy, what I did to his bitch and little kid – everything.’

  In truth, Cross had wondered about this himself, and the prospect secretly terrified him. All he said to Clarke, however, was, ‘Why would he? She’s his hostage, not his fucking shrink.’

  ‘We need to find him,’ Sinnott said, starting to unravel. ‘Without Reddick to back her up, it won’t matter what Iris tells the police. Did you check his bag again? Maybe—’

  ‘I checked it,’ Cross said, referring to the little black gym bag Reddick had left behind at his condo. ‘What there was the first time we looked is all there is: a disposable cell phone and a second roll of duct tape, that’s it. Nothing to tell us where he might be now, with or without Iris.’

  ‘You fucking dickwads,’ Clarke said. ‘We don’t need to know where he’s at. All we gotta do is sit tight and wait.’

  ‘Wait?’ Sinnott asked. ‘For what?’

  ‘For Reddick to call or try us again.’ He took a deep breath, grimacing, then mumbl
ed on. ‘Or are you dumb enough to think he’s all done fucking with us?’

  Sinnott had no answer.

  ‘We could go out lookin’ for him, sure. I know where both he and his old lady live and I know where he works. But why go to him when it’s just a matter of time before the asshole comes to us?’

  ‘Ben’s right,’ Cross said, only now realizing it himself. ‘Chasing Reddick’s tail is probably exactly what he wants us to do. If we wait for him to chase ours instead, and we’re ready for him when he shows, the advantage will be ours, not his.’

  ‘Unless he’s still got Iris,’ Sinnott said.

  He wasn’t expecting Clarke to agree with him, especially in his present state, but when Cross didn’t reply either, he was stunned.

  ‘Wait a minute. As long as he’s got Iris, he’s holding all the cards. Right?’

  ‘That all depends on . . . how much she knows,’ Clarke said, barely getting the words out. He’d already popped a dose of Vicodin since getting in the car and he was starting to fade. ‘Don’t matter if she’s his shrink or not. Longer she and Reddick are together, the more time he’s gonna have to tell her his side of things. And if he does that—’

  ‘It might be better for us if he kills her,’ Cross said.

  Sinnott studied the only side of his face he could see from where he sat, looking for some inkling of regret, but he may as well have been searching for a tear in a porcelain doll’s eye. He’d known Cross now for going on four years, and every time he thought he could no longer be surprised by his utter lack of compassion, the man did or said something to prove him wrong.

  ‘You don’t really mean that?’

  Cross met his gaze evenly in the car’s rearview mirror. ‘I like Iris quite a lot, Will, but as you well know, she broke off our engagement yesterday. So dead or alive, it makes no difference. Either way, she’s lost to me.’

  Sinnott, words failing him, fell back in his seat and asked no more questions.

  Reddick drove down to Irvine to see Dana and Jake. He didn’t know what else to do. He needed time to think and getting out of Los Angeles for a while seemed like a good idea.

  During the drive down, he wondered what Cross’s girlfriend was going to do. Asking her not to call the police had been a longshot, at best, but it was a longshot worth taking. He’d been so pathetic – fleeing Cross’s condo with his tail between his legs, taking a hostage he had no intention of holding or harming – she might have felt sorry enough for him to want to help. And there was no love lost between her and Cross, that much seemed obvious. If he was lucky, she’d buy in, give him until at least the next morning to finish the job he’d started.

  If not, he was probably fucked.

  The police would be looking for him now and it would just be a matter of time before they found him. Cross, Clarke and Sinnott would have a lot of questions to answer, and they might even be charged with Gillis Rainey’s murder, but this was small consolation to Reddick. Seeing Clarke and his friends behind bars had never been the objective. These punks had money and families with considerable influence, and if they wanted to exact payback for Reddick’s failure to play ball with Clarke, they could just as easily arrange it from a prison cell as a poolside lounge at home. So nothing at all had changed; Reddick still needed them dead. The grave was the only place for them where Dana and Jake would forever be beyond their reach.

  Killing Baumhower had been the first step; he had three more to go. Or possibly only two if the beating he’d given Clarke today proved fatal. Jesus, he hoped that was the case. Because he was already tired; murder cut hard against his grain. He’d shot or killed his fair share of bad guys back in West Palm Beach, so pulling the trigger on assholes who had it coming was nothing new to him. But what he was doing now was something entirely different; this was premeditated assassination, and it required a level of emotional detachment he had never plumbed before.

  Clarke and, to a lesser degree, Cross, would be easy to kill. He’d seen enough of both men now to know that they needed killing, that they were narcissistic, baby-faced little animals who, if they hadn’t murdered Gillis Rainey, would have simply murdered someone else, somewhere, some day. Their kind always found a victim, eventually. But Sinnott was just a sop, as greedy and selfish as the other two, perhaps, but nowhere near as inhumane. He’d actually offered Reddick a deal, not merely out of desperation but as a matter of conscience. He’d believed it was the right thing to do. The idea of putting a gun to the fat boy’s head and blowing a hole through it brought Reddick little joy. In fact, he was far from certain he could manage it when and if the time came. He could only hope Sinnott would make things easier for him the way Baumhower had, by saying or doing something incendiary to nudge Reddick over the edge.

  He arrived at the motel a few minutes after noon, not fully satisfied he hadn’t been tailed until he killed the Mustang’s ignition in the parking lot. Dana and Jake’s room was empty. He hadn’t called ahead to let them know he was coming and now he regretted it. He gave in to an irrational rush of fear for as long as it took to get Dana on the phone and hear that they were just down the street having ice cream. He got back in the car to pick them up and they found a public park where Jake could play while he and Dana sat at a bench under a shade tree, away from the other parents, and talked.

  Dana picked up on his mood right away.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she asked.

  ‘A lot. Far more than you want to know. Suffice it to say, this thing’s fully in motion now and the chances of it ending well are nil.’

  ‘Did you . . .’

  ‘I killed Baumhower yesterday and maybe one of the others. Clarke, the one with the knife and the mask.’

  There, he’d said it, in plain English so there could be no misunderstanding: He’d murdered one man and possibly a second. They’d been skirting around the obvious for almost two days now and there wasn’t any point to the charade anymore. Killing Baumhower and his friends had been his intent all along and, now that Baumhower was dead, there was no turning back from it. To pretend otherwise was just a sham.

  He watched Dana’s face fall, her last shred of hope for his salvation gone, and said, ‘It is what it is. I’m sorry.’

  She was silent for a long time. Their son was racing through the sand on the playground without a care in the world, laughing like a little madman, and in the sight she slowly gained a new, unexpected appreciation for what her husband had done and his rationale for doing it. Jake was theirs and no one had the right to take him away from them. The law was supposed to exist to protect them from monsters like Clarke and his friends but it was too haphazard to trust. Reddick described them as people with money and power, and those were the kinds of people who often rendered the law a mirthless joke, slipping between the cracks of the judicial system to get away with every crime imaginable – rape, theft, assault – and yes, even murder.

  Reddick had risked everything for her and Jake, and up to now she’d been acting like he didn’t have to, like the course of action he had chosen to take was an unnecessary concession to his own, intractable paranoia. But she was wrong. She had no doubts about that anymore. Reddick was doing what he had to do to spare her a life of always wondering if this was the night Baumhower’s people would have their revenge against the three of them, or the next. He was fighting the fight that Clarke had brought to him, not the other way around. And that didn’t make him crazy – it just made him uncompromising in his duties as husband and father.

  Dana decided he’d been fighting alone long enough.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ she said.

  He studied her, unsure of her meaning.

  ‘You’ve already told me the worst. You may as well tell me the rest. I think I deserve to know.’

  She had that look on her face she always got when anger had turned to resignation, and getting in her way was akin to throwing yourself in front of a moving train.

  So Reddick told her everything.

  TWENTY-ONE
r />   The first thing Dana said after Reddick finished his tale of woe was, ‘You can’t do this all by yourself.’

  And he didn’t need to ask her what she meant because he’d been thinking the same thing for hours. When he’d first committed to the insane mission he was on, it seemed simple enough: Kill Baumhower and his big friend in the mask. As far as he knew, Baumhower was just a weak-kneed punk with something to hide and his accomplice an overgrown bully who liked to play with knives. But once he discovered Baumhower actually had three accomplices, not just one, and that all four men had the far-reaching power of big money behind them, the task at hand took on a new and far more daunting dimension.

  He had pressed on fueled by the faint hope that speed and the element of surprise could even the odds against him, but any chance of that had been lost this morning at Cross’s condo, where everything that could have gone wrong did. Now Cross and his friends knew he was gunning for them and would use every tool at their disposal to flee, defend themselves, or worst of all, go on the offensive.

  There was nothing supernatural about wealth, but its range was always unpredictable; it could set things in motion or stop them cold, in places near and far, big and small. Judges’ chambers, corporate offices, police headquarters, military bases, crackhouse motels – wealth could infiltrate them all, and leave its mark behind. It wasn’t paranoia to think so; it was just facing facts. The right phone call from Sinnott’s father, or a golf buddy of Clarke’s, and Reddick could be in the crosshairs of a scope within an hour. The game had changed, it was that simple, and trying to play it alone the rest of the way seemed to Reddick like a surefire recipe for defeat.

  He needed help.

  Figuring out what kind of help he needed, and to whom he could turn to ask for it, wasn’t going to be easy. He didn’t want to involve anyone he was close to and few people had the skill set or pedigree the job was likely to require. Who could he ask to risk their life on his behalf, and what could he offer them in return?