Assume Nothing

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  After that, Reddick went flailing down an all-too-familiar black hole of unconsciousness.

  ‘Why the fuck didn’t you shoot him?’ Cross screamed at Ruben’s man Poeto, the minute he had enough breath in his lungs to speak.

  Reddick lay face down on the floor, drooling into the carpet. Iris, still listing to one side in the chair, was sobbing uncontrollably.

  ‘That is not the question you should be asking, Perry,’ Ruben said, opening his knife with a flourish. He reached down, grabbed Cross by the throat and yanked him to his feet. ‘The question you should be asking is, why the fuck don’t we shoot you?’

  Cross didn’t have an answer. He had run out of things to say in his own defense. Ruben was going to kill him, that was finally a foregone conclusion thanks to Reddick, and it was almost a relief to hear him imply that he might simply ‘shoot’ Cross to death, rather than carve him up like a pig in a slaughterhouse.

  Cross shook his head from side to side, too weak to offer anything more in the way of a plea for mercy. Laughably, his cell phone chose this moment to chime, a new email message coming in, and the sound of it almost passed beneath his level of consciousness . . . until it suddenly occurred to him who the sender might be, and what his message could contain.

  He had found one more excuse for Ruben to spare his life, after all.

  Detectives Winn and Lerner were caught in a traffic jam. Neither was surprised. The eastbound 10 leading into downtown was always a slog, almost never for any discernible reason, and today the backup was worse than usual, with cars limping to a brake-light crawl as far back as Western Avenue.

  If they could have justified using their dash lights, they would have put them on just to see how many drivers ahead would notice and get out of their way. But they weren’t sure that the mission they were on constituted an emergency of that magnitude. They were on their way to Joe Reddick’s Echo Park address of record in the hope of finding him home, and how much of a danger he was to the general public they were sworn to protect was something they were still uncertain about.

  They did, however, feel safe in assuming he was involved in the murder of at least one person, Perry Cross’s business partner Andrew Baumhower. The computer in the car had verified that someone had indeed broken into both Baumhower’s home two nights ago and Cross’s residence this morning, and Baumhower had apparently been killed during the commission of the former crime. As Reddick had used the Baumhower burglary as an excuse to seek a meeting with Cross at his office, it didn’t seem like much of a stretch to picture him being Baumhower’s killer. Especially in light of the fact that Reddick fit the description witnesses gave the police of the crazed home invasion robber who had broken into Cross’s place in Venice today.

  And yet, this image of Reddick didn’t particularly jibe with his lack of a criminal record, for one thing, nor his personal backstory, for another. Because what Lerner finally remembered about the man, his memory refreshed by Googling his name on the in-car computer and scanning the old news stories that came up, was that Reddick may have never before played the perpetrator of a violent crime, but he sure as hell had played the victim. Big time.

  ‘Jesus,’ Winn had said after Lerner read one of the stories about Reddick’s experiences in Florida out loud to her.

  ‘Yeah. No wonder his name was familiar to me. All the hours of Court-TV I watch every week, I must’ve seen a half-dozen shows about the poor bastard back then.’

  ‘So what the hell does it mean? It’s been nine years. What, he moves out to LA and waits ’til now to go off the deep end? And why go off on Cross and his partners? What’s the connection?’

  ‘I’ve got a far more salient question for you,’ Lerner said.

  ‘Yeah, I know: What’s—’

  ‘. . . any of this crap got to do with Gillis Rainey? Right. Sooner or later, No, we’ve got to figure it out. Otherwise . . .’

  ‘Hey, you wanted a homicide to work, didn’t you? Well, now we’ve got one.’

  ‘Except it’s not our homicide. The Baumhower case belongs to Valley, not us.’

  Winn glanced over at him, flirting with a smile. ‘So, you want to hand it over to them, let them talk to Mr Reddick, instead?’

  Lerner just looked at her, irked once again by his partner’s uncanny ability to use his own words against him.

  Winn let her grin all the way out of the bag, said, ‘No. I didn’t think so.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  ‘Come on, Joe, wake up.’ Cross slapped Reddick across the face again. ‘Wake up, time’s a wastin’!’

  Reddick opened his eyes, saw Cross peering into them, their faces only inches apart. Reddick realized he was sitting in the chair Iris Mitchell had occupied earlier, his ankles tied together and his hands bound behind the chair’s back. Iris was now laying on her side on the floor to his right, silent and motionless, leading Reddick to wonder if she hadn’t just been shoved off the chair with the heel of someone’s shoe.

  Behind Cross, the big Mexican with the gun was still standing watch. There was no sign of Ruben Lizama in the room.

  Reddick tested the tape on his wrists, rocking around on the chair with the effort, and didn’t feel any give whatsoever.

  ‘Forget it,’ Cross said. ‘You can’t get loose. Poeto taped you up good.’

  A thought suddenly occurred to Reddick: He was alive. Why was he still alive?

  ‘I don’t suppose I have to tell you what will happen if you start screaming,’ Cross said. ‘Or do I have to actually demonstrate?’

  Reddick noticed now that he was holding a knife in his one good hand. There was a renewed confidence about him; his eyes were still wild, but not with fear. This looked like madness.

  ‘What you’ve gotta do is eat shit and die, asshole,’ Reddick said. But his growing unease was obvious. He should be dead. Why the hell hadn’t they killed him already?

  ‘You’re angry at me,’ Cross said. ‘Well, I can sort of see how you might be.’ He leaned in to give Reddick a close-up look at the blade of the knife. ‘But imagine how angry I am at you. How many reasons you’ve given me to do some really fucked up things to you before I kill you.’ He laughed. ‘And I am going to kill you. I think we can do away with any doubts you might have about that right now.’

  So Ruben was going to let Cross do the honors, Reddick thought. But why? Shouldn’t Cross be dead himself by now?

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ Reddick asked. ‘Where’s Lizama?’

  ‘He had a little errand to run. He’ll be back. In the meantime, you and I are going to have a little chat about money.’

  None of this was making any sense. Reddick was beginning to feel queasy. ‘What?’

  ‘See, I got this idea while you were unconscious. I can’t give Ruben the money I owe him, but maybe you can. You’re a retired cop. Cops have pensions. If you’ve been a smart investor, you could be pretty well off. In fact, you could be loaded.’

  The truth was, Reddick did have a decent nest egg socked away, built around his RBPD pension. But if Cross or Lizama were insane enough to think he was going to pull so much as a dime from it for either of them . . .

  ‘You’re dreaming,’ he told Cross.

  ‘Yeah. We figured you’d have that reaction. A badass like you isn’t going to give up his life’s savings – hell, his children’s inheritance – just to save himself a little pain, right? You’ve gotta be properly motivated.’

  Reddick was beginning to sense where this was going. He didn’t know how it was possible, but he couldn’t think of anything else Cross and his friends could possibly threaten him with and expect him to cave.

  ‘Where’s Lizama?’ he asked again, voice rising to meet the level of his panic.

  Cross smiled, confirming Reddick’s worst fears. ‘He’s gone to get Dana and Jake,’ he said.

  Dana was losing her mind. Jake was going stir-crazy at the motel and she hadn’t heard from Joe in almost twenty-four hours. Her calls just kept going straight to his voicemail.r />
  He’d given her specific instructions to sit tight, but it was getting harder to do with each passing minute. The gravity of what she’d done – encouraged her husband to kill four people for the sake of their son – had finally begun to sink in. As had the depth of the love she had for Reddick, no matter how emotionally damaged he might be. She loved him, almost as much as she loved Jake, and yet she’d all but sent him to his death by granting him permission to go on this insane manhunt of his, in search of men who, by his estimation, had money enough to pay a small army to kill him if they couldn’t kill him themselves.

  If she could have thought of a way to stop him on her own, to undo the terrible mistake she’d made in letting him go in the first place, Dana would have done it. But she knew that anything she tried now would only run the risk of making things worse. Calling the police was out of the question. Reddick had already killed one man, maybe more, and the police would treat him accordingly. Would Joe just throw his hands up without a fight if they found him? Or was he too far gone to care whether he died an old man in a prison cell, or as the man he was today, in a hail of police gunfire?

  Dana couldn’t say.

  And it was this uncertainty that ultimately resigned her to doing nothing. She and Jake would stay where they were, as Reddick had instructed, and hope – pray – for the best. They were safe here, at least that much she had no doubts about, and their safety was, after all, what her husband was out there risking everything for.

  She just had to convince Jake to endure the motel a little longer. His boredom had the boy getting into everything. In the three days they’d been here, he’d opened all the dresser drawers and bathroom cabinets a dozen times, and at least once, he’d dumped the entire contents of her purse on the floor, including the gun Joe had given her for their protection. Luckily, Dana was in the room at the time and had snatched the weapon up before Jake could touch it, but the close call had scared her half to death, enough that she had pulled the clip from the gun once she was out of Jake’s sight and hidden both where he could never reach them, between a blanket and extra pillow on a high rack in the closet.

  Had she stopped to think about it, she would have realized how furious Joe would be to learn she’d done this, stored the semi-automatic, unloaded, where she couldn’t possibly reach it quickly if she needed to. But it had been a long time since she’d stopped worrying about her and Jake being found here. How could they be? They were forty miles from home, registered in a motel none of them had ever been to before. Only Joe knew they were here.

  She and Jake had nothing to fear.

  Ruben had never spent much time in Orange County, but he knew how to get to Irvine. You just drove south from Los Angeles on the San Diego Freeway for about forty minutes, or until you could literally see the fortunes of the city shift from want to prosperity, shard-shaped, mirror-skinned skyscrapers rising up from the earth on every side.

  Though he rarely drove himself anywhere, this was one trip Ruben was happy to make on his own. Even the impasses in traffic that intermittently slowed his progress couldn’t dampen his mood. The more he thought about it, the more he had to admit Perry Cross was right: On some level, Joe Reddick was to blame for his troubles. And soon, Reddick would be made to pay for it.

  With his blood, certainly, and if Ruben was lucky, many thousands of US dollars, as well, though this last remained a mere hope. It had been clever of Cross to think of it, keeping Reddick alive long enough to see if he had the resources to provide Ruben with the quarter million dollars he’d come here for. Many Americans had that kind of money saved for their retirement, why shouldn’t Reddick? Still, Ruben wasn’t making this drive to Irvine with the expectation it would result in his getting paid; that would have been foolish. No, he was driving down to Irvine, to find Reddick’s wife and little boy, more to satisfy his growing need for vengeance than any desire to be compensated. What shape his vengeance would take he didn’t yet know, and was in no hurry to consider. When the time came, his hostages in hand, he would let his black heart decide what to do with them, as he always did in such matters.

  As for Cross, Ruben had already decided to rescind the deal he had struck with the pendejo only minutes ago: A quick, painless death if their efforts to extort $250,000 from Reddick paid off. Because a quick, painless death was unbefitting for the injuries Cross and his friends had inflicted upon Ruben. Whether he got paid now or not, Ruben had been cheated and lied to, taken for a fool and forced to expend time and energy to claim what he should have been freely given. Four days earlier than agreed or not, he should have been home by now, the money he’d entrusted to Ben Clarke laundered as promised and back in his possession. Instead, he was still in Los Angeles, driving a goddamn rental car into Orange County, wrestling with his meager conscience over the damage he may soon feel compelled to do against a little boy he had yet to meet.

  He was happy, yes, excited by the prospect of bringing Joe Reddick to his knees, because that was the rightful fate of anyone who ever crossed Ruben Lizama, however indirectly. But Ruben’s happiness was like morning fog – it very quickly melted away – and now it was gone.

  Leaving nothing but animal fury to take its place.

  THIRTY-THREE

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Reddick asked.

  The words stuck in his throat like a nest of thorns, so much did capitulation turn his stomach. He was hanging by a mere thread of sanity, every ounce of his strength gone, and the only thing keeping him going now was the fear of what could happen to Dana and Jake if he didn’t surrender, fully and unconditionally, to Cross and his friend Ruben Lizama.

  ‘Do you have the money?’ Cross asked.

  ‘Yes. At least, I think so.’

  A credit card. Dana’s goddamn credit card, the one they’d had to use to get her registered into the motel, and the one she’d apparently used out there several times since. It shouldn’t have been important, it would have been paranoia to even think of it, but Cross had gotten hold of their credit histories somehow, some friend of his had sent a copy of them to his cell phone, for Chrissake, and the charges in Irvine had pointed Cross to where Dana and Jake were hiding out just as surely as a neon sign.

  Now Lizama was on his way to find them, a sadistic psychopath with a grudge to bear, and Reddick knew if he allowed himself to imagine what such a man might do to them for as long as a second . . . he would snap for good. Give up the ghost of his sanity once and for all and seal everyone’s fate. He had already come close to doing exactly that once, immediately after Cross had told him where Ruben Lizama was, and why. But after Cross had stuffed a rag in his mouth to stifle his screams and warned him to chill out, he’d found the strength to pull back. Breathe. Close his eyes and surrender.

  Surrender.

  ‘Can you get your hands on it?’ Cross asked, ready to put the gag back in Reddick’s mouth at any time. ‘Electronically, I mean?’

  Reddick tried to think. ‘I don’t know. I can try.’

  ‘Try?’ Cross laughed, a little boy finding mirth in the throes of an ant he was torching with a magnifying glass. ‘Man, you’d better do more than that.’

  It was clear to Reddick that Cross was mad; his mind had given way under the pressure Reddick and Ruben had separately exerted and his fear and desperation to survive had been supplanted by something else, something Reddick found far more disturbing: relief. He had to know that Ruben was going to kill him, that none of this was going to save him, and yet Cross was acting as if the two men had struck a bargain of some kind, like if Reddick came through with the money, he might still have something to gain from it. But what? What could Lizama have possibly promised him?

  Escape.

  Cross kept rolling the word around in his mind, over and over again, a goal to pursue like the gold ring on a merry-go-round.

  Escape.

  Fuck a painless death. There was no such thing. Death of any kind was defeat, the end to a story he had only begun to write, and Cross wasn’t ready to j
ust bend over and take it just because Ruben had promised him it wouldn’t hurt. He could still run away. He had money enough for that. There were places in the world he could hide that neither Ruben nor Reddick would ever think to look for him, and, properly assimilated, he’d be impossible to find even if they cared to try. There’d be no honor in running, it would hurt his pride for years to come, but he’d be alive, and he would find a way to rebuild himself from the ground up and reclaim all that he’d lost. He could do it, he was sure of it.

  But first he had to escape.

  He thought he knew how he could do it. He dared not try to take on the gorilla Ruben had left here to watch over him on his own; all he had was a knife, and the big man had a gun, and even if he were unarmed, the giant Mexican could probably kill Cross with his bare hands, Ruben’s knife stuck to the hilt in his fucking throat. But Reddick was another matter. Reddick might have a chance against Poeto and, more importantly, wouldn’t hesitate to go after the big man regardless of the odds against him. All Reddick needed was an opportunity to try.

  It wouldn’t have to be much of a fight. Thirty seconds, perhaps even less. If the two assholes could just keep each other occupied for thirty seconds, it would be enough for Cross to hit the door running and never look back.

  Cross took out his smartphone and opened up its online browser. ‘We’ll use my phone,’ he said to Reddick. ‘You tell me where the accounts are and how to log in, I’ll do all the data entry.’

  ‘That won’t work,’ Reddick said.

  ‘What? Why the fuck not?’

  ‘Because I don’t remember the passwords. They’re stored on my computer, I’ve never bothered to memorize them.’