Assume Nothing

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  So like his friends, he had to die.

  He wasn’t going to make himself an easy target, however. Reddick knew that. Which was why he wasn’t surprised when Cross never showed up at any of the three places he looked for him that night. He would have been a fool to go home, of course, but Reddick had hoped Cross would at least try crashing at either Clarke’s home or Sinnott’s instead. When midnight came and went and he had failed to appear at either residence, nor his own, Reddick reluctantly decided to postpone the hunt for him until morning, realizing he might be waiting for a man who had jumped on a plane and fled Los Angeles – if not the continental United States – hours ago.

  Unlike Cross, Reddick had no compunction about sleeping in his own bed that night. He had avoided this luxury long enough, and the thought of Cross coming to look for him at home was hardly a deterrent. If he couldn’t defend himself in his own abode against an amateur like Cross, Reddick thought, he deserved to die.

  He parked Dana’s sedan on the street, a full block west of the house and not far from where he’d left his Mustang earlier in the day, then sat there behind the wheel for a moment, looking for incongruities. Nothing immediately jumped out at him. His home was dark and quiet and the sidewalks were deserted. He didn’t know what Cross owned, but only a few of the unfamiliar vehicles on the street resembled anything Reddick could picture him driving, even on an impromptu stakeout mission: a green BMW, a black Lexus, and a silver Audi TT. All three cars appeared to be cold and vacant – until the taillights on the Audi flickered on for a moment and someone inside lowered the driver’s side window to let in some air.

  Reddick snatched his binoculars off the passenger seat and focused them on the Audi’s side mirror. He couldn’t see much of the driver but what he could see ruled out Cross, unless Andy Baumhower’s friend thought a blonde wig and red lipstick would make for a clever disguise. Reddick found the hooded sweatshirt he’d thrown in the back seat, slipped it on and got out of the car. He pulled the hood up over his head to bury his face deep in shadow, shoved his hands and his forty inside the sweatshirt’s pockets, and started walking.

  Cross’s girlfriend never saw him coming. She’d let the car’s windows fog over with her breath before cracking the side one and the rear hadn’t cleared in time for her to catch his approach in it.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  She turned at the sound of Reddick’s voice, found him standing in the street only inches from her face, and nearly jumped through the Audi’s headliner. She clumsily turned the car’s ignition to the accessories position, rolled her window all the way down, and cried, ‘Jesus! You scared the shit out of me!’

  ‘I asked you a question.’ Reddick’s head turned this way and that, his eyes scanning the street for any sign of Cross.

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Forget it. Go home.’

  ‘I spoke to Will Sinnott a few hours ago. He told me something I think you’d be interested to know.’

  ‘Bullshit. If this is some kind of trick—’

  ‘It’s not a trick. Nobody knows I’m here, I came here on my own.’

  ‘Great. Then you can get the hell out of here on your own. Right now, before you get hurt.’

  ‘You may not need to do any more killing, Mr Reddick,’ the blonde said, spitting the words out before he could silence her. ‘Because you aren’t the only one who might like to see Perry and his friends dead.’

  That gave Reddick reason to pause. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Can we go inside?’

  ‘No, goddamnit! What the fuck are you talking about?’

  Cross’s girlfriend opened her door, stepped out of the car to look him straight in the eye.

  ‘Inside,’ she said.

  Iris told Reddick everything about Ruben Lizama she’d learned from Cross and Sinnott. They sat at his dining room table, the whole house dark except for the tiny light over the stove in the kitchen nearby. The gun he’d pointed at her head that morning lay atop the table, right in front of him where he could reach it in a flash if he found the need to use it. At some point, he had asked for her name and she gave it to him: ‘Iris Mitchell.’

  ‘OK. So Cross and his pals are in hock to some psycho with the Mexican mafia,’ Reddick said. ‘What is that to me?’

  ‘I told you. It means you can stop worrying about killing Perry, Will, and Ben because Ruben, if he’s half the killer they say he is, will probably do the job for you. You’ve already got Andy’s blood on your hands – why hurt anybody else if you don’t have to?’

  ‘Because I’m not interested in playing the percentages, that’s why,’ Reddick said, not bothering to correct Iris’s false belief that Sinnott and Clarke were still alive. ‘I’ve got a zero-tolerance policy where my family’s welfare is concerned, and I’m not going to count on Ruben Lizama or anyone else to guarantee it. That’s my job.’

  ‘And the only way to do your job is to kill Perry and the others yourself.’

  ‘That’s the only way, yeah.’

  ‘Because you don’t want what happened to you in Florida to happen here.’

  Reddick recoiled. First Sinnott, now Iris Mitchell – why couldn’t they leave Kaye and the children in peace? ‘What, did you fucking Google my name, too?’

  ‘No. But Will told me what he discovered about you when he did.’

  ‘My past is my business, not yours or anyone else’s. And that’s all the conversation we’re going to have on the subject.’

  ‘Or else what? You’ll kill me, too?’

  Reddick glared at her, feeling his powers of restraint giving way to the overwhelming need to vent, to give voice to his outrage and pain he’d been fighting for days. ‘You weren’t there, lady,’ he said, seething. ‘You think I’m being unreasonable, letting something that happened nine years ago turn me into the very thing I used to despise. But you weren’t there to see the blood and the bodies, to buy the caskets, to stand next to three open graves and watch your world – your whole fucking world – go down into the earth for the worms to feed on like so much shit.

  ‘Yeah, I’m crazy. You’re goddamn right, I’m crazy.’ Reddick leaned across the table toward her, hissed, ‘But I’d be crazier still to let it happen again.’

  He fell back into his chair and grew still. The house descended into silence. Iris did nothing to disturb it, afraid to push him past the point of no return.

  ‘If you don’t stop now, they’ll put you away for life,’ she said finally. ‘Your wife and son will be alive, yes, but they won’t have you. Is that what you want?’

  ‘What I want, I used to have. Twice. But I’m living proof that the things we want aren’t meant to last. Something or someone always fucks it up. So I’ve learned it’s better to make do with the next best thing.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘A clear conscience.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Of course you don’t. But I’ll try to explain it to you anyway.’

  As she waited for him to go on, Reddick wondered why in the hell he was doing this, peeling the sheet off the cold, dark corpse of his past just to try and justify his actions to this woman, a woman he didn’t know and had no real reason to trust. And yet he did trust her. She was Cross’s girlfriend, pretty and young and accustomed to money just like him, but whereas little more could be said about Cross, Reddick had the sense that Iris was a different animal, one far more human and grounded in reality. The fact that she could have turned him over to the police hours ago and hadn’t only reinforced the idea that her empathy for him might actually be genuine.

  ‘When Kaye and the kids died . . .’ he began.

  ‘Your family in Florida.’

  Reddick nodded. ‘I blamed myself for years afterward, convinced they’d still be alive if I’d only done something, anything, differently. Come home from work sooner that day or put better locks on the doors. I didn’t even know the crazy fuck who killed them, and he didn’t
know me – I’d never heard his name until they found his prints in the house – and yet I thought, if I’d been a better cop, I would have found him and put him away before he could do what he did. It didn’t matter that I’d never worked a case in which he was involved. I should have found him and stopped him.

  ‘It was insane, of course. I’d had no role whatsoever in what happened to Kaye and the kids, and eventually I figured that out. But it took years to get wise, and in the meantime I lived with the guilt of being complicit in their murders, of not having done enough to defend my wife and my children from the monsters I knew first-hand are lurking around every corner of this shithole world we live in.’

  Reddick paused, recognizing the need to slow down and catch his breath. He hadn’t talked about any of this for over a year, since his last few sessions with Howard Elkins, the shrink he used to see here in Los Angeles, and he knew how hard and deep he could fall if he let this train get away from him. When he started up again, it was with a greater focus on control, his voice a laser light piercing the dark.

  ‘You learn to get over the loss. If I lost Dana and Jake, either to your friend Cross or by some other means, there’s a chance I could survive it. I’ve done it before, maybe I could do it again. But not the guilt. The guilt’s another matter. This time, there is something I can do to protect what’s mine, to change the script before it gets written, and there’s no way in hell I’m not going to do it. No way. The price I have to pay, that’s fucking immaterial. As long as I know in the end I did everything I could do to keep Dana and Jake safe and sound – everything – that’s all that matters.’

  He waited for Iris to offer some rebuttal, but she just sat there looking at him, her eyes shimmering with tears. There were a million things she could say to dispute his reasoning, but none she could voice and actually believe. She had heard all the evidence and the only conclusion she could reach was the same one Reddick himself had come to long ago: Murder was the only guarantee. And nothing less than a guarantee would do. Maybe it was fair to ask others to count on an imperfect criminal justice system to protect their loved ones from harm, but not Reddick. Reddick deserved to know, with absolute, unqualified certainty, that Perry and his friends would never threaten his family again.

  And Iris didn’t know how to deny him that.

  ‘I won’t help you,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t ask you to. All I need from you is what you’ve already promised me: another twelve hours without police interference.’

  Iris remained silent.

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘There has to be another way. They’re just stupid little boys who like to pretend they’re more badass than they are. Ben might be a little dangerous, but Will wouldn’t hurt a fly, and Perry—’

  ‘You’re wasting your breath, lady.’

  ‘Perry’s just a bully who likes to talk tough. He’s no killer. Please.’

  Reddick stared back at her, trying to give her one last chance to change her mind.

  ‘Please,’ Iris said again. And now the tears she’d been managing to hold at bay for the last several minutes were flowing freely. Not because Perry and his friends deserved to be mourned, but because she knew they were already as good as dead.

  And she wanted to be able to tell herself later she’d made every possible effort to plead for their lives.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ‘Shit!’

  Cross reared up in the bed, waited for his eyes to fully focus on the hotel alarm clock he’d just glanced at. There’d been no mistake: It was 7:28 a.m.

  He leapt to his feet, snatched his pants off the floor and began throwing on his clothes. The girl named Danni stirred behind him, face down atop the sheets and slobbering all over a pillow, but she did not awaken. There were purple marks on the cheeks of her ass Cross could not remember making.

  He’d had too much to drink and exhausted himself trying to match his partner climax for climax, allowing what should have been a two-hour party to turn into an allnighter he couldn’t afford. Cursing his stupidity, he checked his phone while slipping on his shoes and, much to his horror, saw no messages waiting for him. This being Monday, Sinnott, if not Clarke, should have been up by now and made at least one attempt to return Cross’s calls from the night before. That he hadn’t erased all doubt in Cross’s mind that something was wrong.

  Very wrong.

  He left the room without a word to the girl and called both Sinnott and Clarke on his way down to his car, knowing he’d only get their voicemails again before he actually did. He didn’t bother leaving any more messages, just hauled ass over to Clarke’s home as fast as rush-hour traffic would permit.

  The first thing he noticed upon reaching the house was Sinnott’s Acura, parked right in front where it couldn’t be missed. It was the worst of all possible signs, dashing the faint hope Cross had been holding on to that one or both of his friends was elsewhere. With Clarke’s car still back at Cross’s condo, the Acura’s presence here made it highly likely that both Clarke and Sinnott were here, as well.

  So why weren’t they answering their goddamn phones?

  Cross parked his own car and went up to Clarke’s door, walking like a man being escorted to the gallows. He looked for indications of a break-in, a shattered door jamb or a broken window, but everything about the house appeared normal. He rang the bell once, twice, and cursed himself for letting Sinnott take Clarke’s spare set of keys instead of holding on to to them himself. Nobody came to the door, nor made a sound on the other side.

  ‘Ben! Will! Open the goddamn door!’

  Now he pounded on the door with a fist, changing nothing. The house remained silent. A picture of what might lay inside formed in his mind and, for the first time in his adult life, fear took hold of him with a grip he couldn’t break. He started to go back to his car, then stopped, inspired by a sudden thought. He produced his cell phone, dialed Sinnott’s number. He pressed his ear to the ice-cold surface of the door . . .

  . . . and heard Sinnott’s phone faintly chime from somewhere inside the house.

  How he got to his car and behind the wheel, he would never be able to recall. His next conscious thought found him on the freeway, driving like a wild man eastbound on the 10, destination unknown. Sinnott was dead, and probably Clarke, as well. There was nothing else for him to believe. Reddick had killed them both, and now the crazy sonofabitch would be coming after Cross.

  Unless he could be stopped.

  But how? Reporting him to the police, even as a triple murderer, was still a move guaranteed to cause Cross more problems than it would solve. His life over the last two weeks had become a whisper-thin scaffolding of felonies and lies that Reddick, alive and conversant, could bring down in thirty seconds. A dead Joe Reddick, on the other hand, would make the perfect patsy, somebody Cross could blame for damn near everything the police would expect Cross himself to explain – the deaths of his three friends and, maybe, even that of Gillis Rainey, as well. It wouldn’t be easy, but Cross was sure that, given time, he’d be able to tie Reddick to all of it to the satisfaction of the authorities. With Reddick dead, who would remain among the living to tell a different story?

  Iris.

  Iris would have to be dealt with, of course. Her perpetual silence either purchased or forced upon her, one or the other. But that was something else Cross was confident he could accomplish, given an hour or two of unfettered thought to consider the problem. He had experience handling Iris; putting her in check for good would be a piece of cake. All he had to do was figure out how to make a dead man out of Reddick before Reddick made a dead man out of him.

  Cross slowed the car, steadied his breathing, and eased his grip on the steering wheel, willing himself down from the state of all-out panic he’d allowed to overtake him. He had to start thinking clearly again if he wanted to survive. What to do first?

  Make sure Will Sinnott and Ben Clarke were really dead, he decided. Assuming that was the case when it wasn’t would be fool
ish and counterproductive. Sinnott had a gun and knew how to use it, but if Clarke were still alive, fucked up as he was, he would make for a better ally. Clarke knew people Cross and Sinnott did not, the kind of people who’d be willing and able to either shut Reddick down themselves or help Cross and Clarke do it on their own. They wouldn’t work for free, but that was OK.

  Cross began driving with a purpose now, doubling back on the freeway to head for Clarke’s office at Nightshades, his nightclub in Santa Monica. Finding his friend there would be nothing short of a miracle, one that defied all logic, but he didn’t care. Hoping for miracles was what he was down to at this point and shooting his brains out, just to save Reddick the trouble, was his only other alternative.

  There was a lone car he didn’t recognize in the club’s parking lot when he arrived, a white GMC Yukon in nondescript trim, and his heart soared with relief. It had to be Clarke’s, he thought, something the big man had rented or borrowed to throw Reddick off the scent. Reddick himself would have never parked a car here so conspicuously and, this early in the morning, it was unlikely to belong to one of Clarke’s employees. Cross parked his Escalade in an adjacent space, jumped out, and went to the Yukon’s side glass to peer into its interior.

  The man in the passenger seat, beside a beefy driver with dark brown skin, rolled his window down and showed Cross a warm smile.

  ‘Perry, what’s up? Come, get in. We can wait for our friend Ben together,’ Ruben Lizama said.