Assume Nothing

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  Throughout the drive north back to Los Angeles late Sunday afternoon, Reddick put his mind to work on the problem and came up with a list of possibilities.

  It was a very short list.

  ‘Iris, baby, are you OK? Did he hurt you?’

  ‘Cut the bullshit, Perry. You don’t care if he hurt me or not and we both know it. If you did, our names would be all over the news by now.’

  Iris could hear Perry breathing on the other end of the line.

  ‘If you’re asking why I didn’t call the police—’

  ‘I’m not asking you anything. I only called because I need my things. My wallet and my keys.’

  ‘Hold on a minute. Are you saying Reddick let you go? You’re safe?’

  ‘Safe is a relative term. I’m free and physically unharmed, if that’s what you’re asking. But I need my ID and my car keys, and you’ve got them both.’

  ‘Sure, sure. Where are you? I’ll come get you right now. We can talk and I can explain what the hell happened this morning. I mean, you must be wondering, right?’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any explanations. I just want my things. And I don’t want you to pick me up, either. Frankly, Perry, I don’t feel safe being alone with you right now, so I was going to suggest we meet somewhere in public. The food court in Farmer’s Market, say in forty minutes?’

  Cross snickered. ‘Are you kidding? You’re afraid of being alone with me? That fucking wackjob Reddick’s the one who put a gun to your head and dragged you off, not me!’

  ‘Is that his name? Reddick?’

  ‘What the hell did he say to you? He’s crazy, Iris, I told you that. Whatever it was that’s got you acting like this, it was a lie. A goddamn lie!’

  ‘Fine. If you don’t want to come—’

  ‘OK, OK. Take it easy, shit. Where will you be in the food court?’

  ‘In the west patio, near the ice cream place. “Gill’s,” I think it’s called. My car’s still parked on the street outside your condo. You can use my keys to drive it up so I won’t have to come get it later.’

  ‘But I’m not at home right now, I’m at Ben’s. It would take me at least an hour to get the car and then drive it out to West LA.’

  ‘So I’ll give you an hour. But that’s all. Just one hour.’

  ‘And then how will I get back to my place?’

  ‘I don’t know. Take a taxi, maybe? You stole seventy-five hundred dollars from me only three days ago. You should be good for the fare.’

  Cross was in the process of stammering a rejoinder when she hung up.

  ‘Well?’ Sinnott asked, as Cross angrily snapped the lid closed on his cell phone.

  ‘You heard it. She wants me to bring her car and her wallet to her at the fucking Farmer’s Market in an hour.’

  ‘Then Reddick just let her go?’

  ‘So she says. Or, maybe, so Reddick would have us believe.’

  Following his inference, Sinnott’s face, incredibly, grew paler still.

  They were sitting in the living room of Clarke’s Culver City home, where they could watch for any unwanted visitors through the big picture window that faced the street. It was a few minutes past four o’clock. Clarke was upstairs in the bedroom asleep, a snoring giant dosed to oblivion with prescription painkillers. Cross had a drink in his hand, his first of the day, and Sinnott was nursing his third just since they’d arrived, counting on alcohol to do for his fear what Clarke’s meds had done for his pain. His Beretta lay out in the open on the arm of his chair; the right one, near his gun hand.

  ‘Are you going to go?’ Sinnott asked.

  Cross got to his feet. ‘Of course. We both are.’

  ‘Me? But Ben—’

  ‘Fuck Ben. He can take care of himself. I’m going out to Farmer’s Market and you’re going with me as backup.’

  ‘You think it’s a trap?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it’d be a lucky break for us if it is.’

  ‘How the hell do you figure that?’

  ‘Because that would mean Ben was right: Reddick’s come to us. If it’s a trap, he’s going to be there somewhere for you to find and take care of, like you should have done this morning. Won’t he?’

  Cross glared at him, waiting for an argument. Sinnott just nodded his head and took another swig of his drink.

  ‘Christ, what a nightmare. Every time you think it can’t get any worse . . .’

  ‘Shut up, Will, and let’s go.’

  ‘Ruben will be here in five days to get his money, Andy’s dead, Ben’s a cripple, and we’re running around worried about fucking Reddick.’

  Cross snatched the gun off Sinnott’s chair and aimed it at his left eye. ‘Shut the fuck up and get on your feet or I swear to God I’ll kill you myself!’

  Sinnott stood up slowly, wobbly but unflinching. ‘You or Reddick. Today or tomorrow.’ He wrenched the gun from Cross’s limp hand. ‘What the fuck’s the difference?’

  He made his way to the door and went out to the car, showing no signs of caring whether Cross was following or not.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The landmark Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles was a contradiction in time. Much of the 200-acre, ranch-style shopping and dining complex in the heart of the city’s Fairfax district still appeared as it had at its opening in 1934 – the white clapboard walls and green tiled roofs, the open patios crammed with folding chairs and umbrella-festooned tables, the lush green landscaping ringing its exterior. But counterpoint to all these things were intrusions of a less fanciful present: franchise coffee shops and ATM machines, menu boards that didn’t list a single item priced under a dollar, a trolley line in the parking lot that connected the market to the towering mega-mall adjacent.

  Still, for all its incongruities, Farmer’s Market remained the popular social hub it had been almost from the beginning, when Angelenos were first moved to say about it, without the irony such a comical tagline would demand today: ‘Meet me at Third and Fairfax.’ It was quaint and comfortable, and it bustled and hummed with a heavy, multicultural crowd, day or night.

  It was the crowd and the open layout of the place Iris was thinking about when she chose the market as the site for her rendezvous with Cross. She wanted lots of people around and a dozen different points of exit to choose from should she feel the need to bolt, and this location offered her both, even this late on a Sunday afternoon.

  Waiting for Cross at a table in a corner of the agreed-upon west patio, she went over her reasons for suggesting this meeting for what felt like the hundredth time, and again had to wonder if they weren’t the work of a woman who’d lost her mind. She did indeed need her keys, car, and wallet, and she sure as hell wasn’t going alone to Cross’s place to get them, but that was just a pretense. After six hours of holding back, she had finally decided to call the police, unable to go on refusing to do so simply because a wild man with a gun had asked her not to, and she couldn’t bring herself to make the call until she’d talked to Cross. She felt she owed him that much.

  Her kidnapper this morning – Cross had called him ‘Reddick’ – had accused Cross of being nothing less than a murderer, a suspicion she herself had been living with for over twenty-four hours, and she was reluctant to bring the authorities down upon Cross without giving him a chance to answer such a serious charge to her face. Maybe he could convince her that he had played no major role in either the killing of Gillis Rainey or Ben Clarke’s alleged assault upon Reddick’s family. Ben was both a thug and a pea-brained asshole, Iris had always despised him with a passion, so it wasn’t hard for her to imagine him being solely responsible for both offenses. If Cross could persuade her that such was the case, she might be willing to do nothing, at least for a while. But if he couldn’t – if all his words of self-defense rang hollow and false – she could call the police almost gladly, her conscience clear. Still conflicted about Reddick, perhaps, but ready to let her ex-fiancé suffer whatever consequences came his way.

  It wasn’t that long ago sh
e had loved him without reservation. His lies alone had made it impossible for her to go on doing so, but she still cared for him enough to wish him no ill. She wanted his side of the story to relieve her of the notion that she had come within months of marrying a man she had never really known at all.

  Cross and Sinnott were late getting to the market by several minutes. Cross had visited the market’s website on his smartphone before leaving Clarke’s home and found a layout of the complex, so he and Sinnott arrived with a detailed plan of attack firmly in place: where to park the cars, what individual entrance each would use to enter the food court, what position Sinnott would take inside that offered the clearest possible view of the west patio and all its surrounding points of access and egress.

  Cross entered first, leaving Sinnott with instructions to lag behind for a minute or two. He scanned the milling crowd, as much looking for Reddick as Iris, and found the latter sitting at a table across the way, near an ice cream stand called ‘Gill’s,’ as promised. As near as he could tell, she was alone. He watched her for several seconds, testing her behavior for indications of conspiracy, and seeing none, started slowly toward her.

  She saw him coming before he got there but didn’t smile. In fact, if he was able to detect anything in her reaction to seeing him, it was dread. Not a good sign.

  He stood over her before taking a seat, said, ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Of course. Who else—’ She stopped, catching on. ‘Oh. No. Reddick isn’t here.’

  Cross sat down across from her, laid her wallet and keys on the table. ‘You’re sure he didn’t hurt you? He didn’t lay a hand on you at all?’

  ‘No. I’m fine.’ She reached out, grabbed her things. ‘Where did you park my car?’

  ‘I’ll walk you out and show you. After we’ve had a chance to talk.’

  ‘I told you, Perry. I’m not interested in hearing any more of your lies.’

  ‘Lies? What lies? You mean about the check?’

  Iris didn’t answer him.

  ‘What did he tell you, Iris? Why are you acting like this?’

  She looked around to make sure they couldn’t be overheard, then lowered her voice to say, ‘He told me you and your boys killed Gillis Rainey and threatened to do the same to his wife and child. That’s what he told me.’

  ‘That’s insane.’

  ‘Is it? I heard you and Will talking about Gillis in the playroom yesterday, just before I left. You said Andy had dumped his body in the LA River.’

  Now it was Cross’s turn to fall silent. Will had been right: Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse . . .

  ‘We never laid a hand on Gillis. His death was an accident, I swear to you.’

  ‘What kind of accident?’

  He could get up and just walk away without saying another word, but Cross knew that would only send Iris straight to the police. And she knew too much for him to let her do that now. ‘He owed us money. A lot of it, and he kept refusing to pay it back. So we grabbed him and told him we weren’t letting him go until he paid up. We were only trying to scare him, Iris.’

  ‘You kidnapped him?’

  ‘That would be the legal term for it, yes. But he was a fucking diabetic, can you believe that? I’d only heard him mention it once, I’d completely forgotten about it until we found him where we’d locked him up, dead, his mouth all frothed over like a goddamn dog, or something.’

  Iris turned her eyes away from him, shaking her head from side to side. ‘Oh, Perry . . .’

  ‘It was a goddamn accident. An incredible stroke of bad luck. But to the police, it would have been murder. We’d have all ended up in prison for life. So we did what we had to do to protect ourselves. We had Andy get rid of the body.’ A small, sad smile crossed his face. ‘And naturally, the dumbshit made a complete mess of it.’

  ‘He ran into Reddick’s car trying to get away.’

  ‘Yes. Jesus, why bother with all these questions if you already know all the answers?’

  ‘Because I don’t know why, Perry. Why would you do these things? How could you?’

  ‘You haven’t been listening. Everything I’ve done I had to do.’

  ‘Including what you did to Reddick?’

  ‘That was Ben’s idea, not mine. And needless to say, it was a mistake. Reddick really is crazy you know. He murdered Andy in cold blood and tried to do the same to me, Will, and Ben. If anybody’s a murderer in all this, it’s him.’

  ‘If that were true, he would have killed me. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Look, I don’t want to argue with you. You can believe what you want to believe. But I need to know what you’re going to do. Have you called the police?’

  ‘No. But I will if you don’t.’

  Cross had to laugh at the suggestion. ‘Me? I just told you—’

  ‘That Gillis’s death was an accident and that you had nothing to do with what Ben did to Reddick.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘In that case, the best thing you could possibly do for yourself is turn yourself in, before the police come looking for you and find you. Let Ben and Will fend for themselves. You can afford to hire a good attorney, Perry, and a really great one could probably fix all this so you do next to no time at all. Maybe even get you off completely.’

  ‘Really? Next to no time at all, huh?’ Cross leaned in close across the table, hissed, ‘Fuck that. And fuck you.’

  Iris had been expecting this reaction; she would have been a fool to think Cross would respond any other way. But it still stung. Somewhere deep down inside, in a corner of her being he had somehow not yet managed to scorch black, she still had feelings for this man.

  But not enough to take another minute of his bullshit.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she said with a little shrug, and started to push away from the table.

  ‘Wait. Wait!’ Cross grabbed her wrists with both hands to stop her cold, a naked desperation he had heretofore kept hidden rising to the surface. He despised himself for the show of weakness he knew he was putting on, aware that Sinnott – and possibly even Reddick – was watching, but try as he might, short of strangling Iris right there at the table, he could see no way around what he was about to do next: beg.

  ‘Let me go,’ Iris said. They were making a small scene and she could feel the eyes of several people upon her.

  ‘I’m sorry. Please, wait. There’s . . . something I haven’t told you yet,’ Cross said.

  He hadn’t meant it as a carrot on a stick, but that was how she took it. Just another goddamn trick. And yet, Iris couldn’t help but wonder: Dear God, could there really be anything more to hear?

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Sit back down and I’ll tell you. Please.’

  Having had to say ‘please’ twice in the span of fifteen seconds, it was all Cross could do not to gag on his own shame. Iris glanced at his hands on her wrists, stating a condition for surrender, and he released her. She sat back down. Waited.

  ‘It isn’t just Reddick and the police I have to worry about,’ Cross said. ‘There’s someone else. Someone way more sick and dangerous than Reddick.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I can’t tell you who. All I can say is, he’s the reason we needed Gillis to pay us what he owed us so badly. This guy loaned us a big chunk of change a while back and the debt comes due at the end of the week. Trouble is, we don’t have the scratch, and if we don’t come up with it, we’re all dead. And I don’t just mean “dead,” Iris. I mean with a red-hot coathanger wire running through our fucking ears “dead.” That’s the kind of animal this guy is.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Yeah. So going to the police is not an option for any of us. That might get Reddick and the law off our backs over the long haul, but it won’t do anything to appease our psychotic little friend. This guy will get payback, no matter how long he has to wait for it, and I don’t mind telling you, thinking about what he might do to get it is a little disconcerting.’

&n
bsp; Iris didn’t know what to think. It sounded so incredible, as if everything Cross had told her before hadn’t already been improbable enough. But she believed him. After years of practice, she had finally learned to tell the difference between what a lie sounded like coming out of his mouth and the truth.

  ‘And this is why you forged a check from me for seventy-five hundred dollars?’

  ‘Of course. If I’d thought I could get away with it, I would have made it out for more. It was a lousy thing to do, I know, but I was desperate. And I couldn’t just ask you for the money without your demanding to know what it was for, so . . .’

  ‘You should still go to the police. They can protect you,’ Iris said.

  ‘The hell they can. Maybe I’m not making myself clear. The man I’m talking about can’t be touched by the police. He’s got connections everywhere, in and out of law enforcement. If we don’t pay him, nothing’s going to save us from this asshole, Iris. Nothing.’

  Whether it was true or not, Iris could see Cross believed it, too much to make arguing with him worth the energy it would take to change his mind. ‘So what are you asking me to do?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m asking you not to do anything, or call anybody or talk to anybody about any of what I’ve just told you, for at least a couple of days, or until Ben and Will and I can figure out a way to pay this guy off. Once that’s done, if you want to drop a dime on us, I’ll dial nine-one-one myself and hand you the phone, I swear to God.’

  Cross didn’t believe in God, so the promise meant nothing to Iris; she recognized it as his first flatout lie of the afternoon, in any case. If she were to remain silent the way he was asking her to – the same way Reddick had asked earlier that day, if for different reasons entirely – the minute Cross felt he was safe from the maniac he’d just described, he’d be actively avoiding any contact with the police, back in full denial mode. Iris had no illusions about this. But if she turned him over to the authorities now and he ended up dead as a result, his body mutilated in some grotesque fashion, she knew she would never be able to shake the idea that she had been responsible. Damning Reddick to whatever fate the police were sure to subject him to was going to be hard enough to live with; setting Cross up to be tortured and killed by some sadistic madman would only make matters infinitely worse.