Dare You

by Jennifer Brown

  Fortunately, Detective Martinez was waiting for me right inside. He gave me a long stare and I could feel myself tense. I hadn’t thought to check how I looked before I left. Would he be able to tell that I had been beaten up last night?

  “You actually look like you’re sick,” he mused. He pointed to the top part of his cheek. “Your eye almost looks bruised.”

  “I fell asleep with my head on the toilet and slid off and hit my face on the edge of the bathtub.”

  He stared, as if he maybe didn’t believe me. “You must have been feeling pretty awful. Now I feel a little bad for doubting you.”

  I went with it. “I told you. Hope I don’t heave on your shoes.”

  “We’ll make this quick.”

  He placed his hand between my shoulders and guided me past the front desk and through the station. I felt like I was being escorted as a prisoner and all eyes were on me. Foreshadowing of my not-too-distant future.

  “Here,” he said, directing me into a tiny hole of an office. It was packed with stacks of papers, files, and books. Everything was sleek and dusted, as I would expect his office to be, but there were zero decorations. It was all work, also as I would expect his office to be. An ancient desktop computer took up most of a nicked-up desk. The only chair in the room was the one behind it.

  “I’m guessing you don’t get a lot of visitors in here,” I said. “You didn’t exactly knock yourself out on interior design.”

  “You can sit there,” he said, ignoring me. He gestured toward the chair. I worked my way behind the desk and sat.

  “So am I special? Because this doesn’t feel special. It feels depressing. A little color wouldn’t kill you. Maybe a plant or something.”

  “You done assessing my work space now?” he asked. He half sat on the edge of the desk, facing me, a little too close. “And want to tell me the truth about your face? Because we both know the sick story is bullshit.”

  “It’s your space,” I said. “And not really, no.” He crossed his arms and stared me down. I sighed. “Okay. Fine. But you’re going to freak out.” He raised his eyebrows expectantly. “The Basiles broke into my house last night. And there was . . . an altercation.”

  He came up off the desk so fast I thought he might launch through the ceiling. “What? When? And they did this to you? How do you know it was them?”

  “Whoa. Stop. See, I knew you’d freak out. It’s no big deal. They caught me by surprise, but I turned it around. Got a tiny bit stabbed, but you should’ve seen the other guy.” The joke fell flat.

  “I’m making a report,” he said, heading for the door.

  “No, don’t!”

  He turned, impatient, and like he was having to explain astrophysics to a kindergartner. “They broke into your house and beat you up. That’s a crime. Actually, it’s multiple crimes. You have to report it.”

  “They said they’d come back if I so much as thought about them again. They’ve seen us both. If we go after them, they’ll know you’re a cop, and Rigo will disappear completely. We’ll never find him.”

  “Nikki . . .”

  “Please?” I said. “If they come back, you can write a hundred reports or shoot them or whatever it is you want to do, okay? But I handled it. It’s okay. Just let it go, so we can do what we need to do.”

  His fists on his hips, he shook his head at his shoes, like he couldn’t believe he was getting ready to do what he was getting ready to do. “You have to promise to stop lying to me. If they come back, you call me immediately.”

  I held up my pinkie. “Pinkie swear.”

  “I don’t like it—”

  Someone knocked twice on his door frame and kept walking down the hall. “Shit,” he said. “I’ll be right back. Been waiting to hear back on a case all morning. Just give me a minute.”

  “Whatever,” I said, swiveling in the chair. “I’ll just sit here and be a good girl.” But as soon as he left, I jiggled the mouse to wake up his computer. I didn’t do good girl. Never had. “Let’s see what you’re working on these days, Detective,” I said to myself. “Other than me, that is. And sexy Blake.”

  He had three tabs open. None of the pages looked familiar to me. They looked like internal network police pages. I could probably get into a shit-ton of trouble for looking at them. I scanned the information and saw the same name on all three.

  “Heriberto Abana,” I read aloud. “You naughty boy, Heriberto, what have you done to get the po-po after you?”

  I couldn’t make sense of the pages Detective Martinez had open, but I knew how to work Google. I opened Chrome and started to type in Heriberto Abana’s name. To my surprise, it was the first thing to pop up as soon as I typed the H. Martinez had searched for this guy before, that was for sure. I went over to his search history.

  Holy crap. He had obsessively searched the shit out of old Heriberto. Whatever the guy had done, it must have been serious.

  He had also searched a bunch of addresses in South Central L.A. Looking for Heriberto’s house, maybe? I plugged an address into Google Maps.

  “Better look out, Herbie,” I said. “The fuzz is coming for you.”

  “Go ahead and make yourself at home,” Detective Martinez said as he came back through the door. He was holding a fistful of papers, which he promptly stacked on top of a billion other papers on a file cabinet.

  “How will you ever find that again when you need it?” I asked.

  “Well, in theory, it’s my job to find stuff,” he said. “And I think I’m pretty good at what I do, so don’t worry about it.”

  “Looks like you haven’t found Heriberto Abana. What did he do? You’ve been looking for him pretty hard. And for quite a while.” I scrolled down through the search history again to prove my point.

  He reached across me and pushed the button to turn off the monitor. “Don’t worry about that, either,” he said. But he’d lost the playfulness in his voice.

  “Why not? You afraid I’ll beat you to finding him? You know, like I did the Hollises a few months ago? Let me see what I can figure out. It’ll be my little freebie to you. As a thank-you for all your help finding Rigo. If, of course, we actually find Rigo.” I reached to turn the monitor back on, but he grabbed my hand.

  “That’s not why you’re here.” Sharp. And I got the same weird vibe I’d gotten off him before, when I asked about the bullet holes in his car. He’d been so cagey about it. So touchy. Was Herbie the reason those holes were there? Was that why the detective was so focused on him? Did it have nothing to do with work at all? Was Heriberto the personal case he had mentioned?

  I yanked my hand out of his. “Whoa. Okay. Whatever. What is your problem?” I see gray all over you, I wanted to say, but then remembered that a sentence like that wouldn’t make any sense to him.

  “It’s personal, okay? Just . . . let’s get to what you’re here for,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.” I swiveled so I was facing the desk, on which he’d laid out several papers. I recognized them right away. They were Dru’s bank papers that we’d taken from evidence. “So what am I looking for?”

  “Tell me if anything jumps out at you,” he said. He came around behind me and rested his palms on the desk, leaning over me so I could smell his cologne. Something spicy and luxurious. He was in a suit today, too. The jacket was draped over the chair I was sitting in. Must have been a special day.

  “Um, not really,” I said, staring. But then something did. Almost literally jumped out at me. Scarlet. Avocado. Maroon. Scarlet-avocado-maroon. Scarletavocadomaroon. I’d seen that combination before. D-O-M. “Dom Distribution,” I said, pointing to a line on the sheet. “The van at the auction.”

  “Yep,” he said. “Remember when that happened, I told you the name of the company sounded familiar? That’s because I’d seen it here. Over and over.” He ran his finger down the sheet and to the next one, and, sure enough, there it was. Dom Distribution. Dom Distribution. Dom Distribution.

  “So Dru was paying Dom Di
stribution a whole hell of a lot of money. For what?”

  Detective Martinez shook his head and pointed to the money column. “He was receiving a lot of money from Dom Distribution.”

  I scanned the column. Dru had received thousands upon thousands of dollars from them over the course of a couple of months. “I don’t get it. Why would they be paying him? Did he work there?” It seemed impossible that a guy like Dru would have worked for an ordinary distribution company.

  Detective Martinez flattened his hand against the papers and leaned forward so he was facing me. “I don’t know. I’m still trying to run down all the paperwork. I’m not sure who the technical owner is of Dom Distribution, but I’d be willing to bet the real owner is a Hollis. Maybe Dru himself.”

  “Or Luna. Since the van clearly wanted us dead,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I suppose that’s possible, but less likely with her being so young.” I turned in my chair, pushing myself back a few inches to get some thinking space. Detective Martinez was not good at personal bubbles.

  “So you’re thinking, what? That Dom Distribution is paying off the Hollises for something? Like hush money?”

  He turned and sat on the corner of his desk, scrunching the papers beneath him. He rubbed his chin while he thought. “Perhaps. Or perhaps they’re only giving the Hollises back their own money.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Where do the Hollises get most of their money?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Movies?”

  “Not likely. Bill Hollis hasn’t produced a movie in almost ten years.”

  I blinked. I hadn’t realized that. But, yeah. Martinez was right. Bill Hollis was one of those quasi-famous names that had just sort of dropped out of existence over the past decade until his daughter ended up dead. So where else would the Hollises get a bunch of money? “From the escort service,” I said. “It went through Dom so the feds couldn’t track them down.”

  “Right.”

  We both sat there for a few minutes in silence, thinking. There was a Hollis connection with Dom Distribution, which meant that there was a Luna connection to Dom Distribution. Made total sense; otherwise, why would they have wanted to run us over? And Ruby had said that the Hollises owned another business. Nobody seemed to know what the other business was. Could it have been a distribution company? And then the big question—how did the Basiles, and Tesori Antico, fit into all of this? Was it just coincidence that the van was at the auction, coming at us just as they were getting away?

  Maybe. Maybe Luna, and the van, were already there because they had followed us there.

  I turned on the computer monitor. Detective Martinez started to reach for the button, but I swatted his hand away.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t mess with your Abana case,” I said. “I just want to look up something.”

  I pulled up the internet and searched for Dom Distribution. Bingo. Immediate hit. I clicked the link. Before I could even read the words, I saw the connection, in a dusty grayish blue that made me want to sneeze.

  “Restoration products,” Detective Martinez read over my shoulder.

  “Antique restoration products,” I added, pointing to the sneezy word antique.

  “So Bill Hollis’s distribution company just happens to sell antique restoratives.”

  I nodded. “And the Basiles’ business just happens to be antiques.”

  “We’ve got a connection,” Martinez said.

  “I say we go to Tesori Antico,” I said.

  Detective Martinez rubbed his jaw a couple more times—I could hear the scritch scritch of his palm against his whiskers. “Why? What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a gut feeling mostly. But I’m thinking if we go to Tesori, Dom Distribution will follow. And when they show up, we can bust them. Figure out who is behind the wheel and why they want to kill us. Or figure out that it’s Luna and have her put away again. Or that it’s Rigo, trying to finish the job that Dru screwed up. Either way, we win.”

  He tick-tocked his head from side to side, as if mulling over what I’d said. “Unless they actually succeed in killing us. Then they win.”

  A sarcastic laugh jumped out of me. “As if.”

  He narrowed his eyes. For a second it felt like he could see the roiling fire oranges and yellows that were now swirling around me, and I felt naked, connected in a weird way that was so much more intimate than Jones had ever succeeded in connecting with me. The oranges and yellows twisted into pine as I twisted into embarrassment. “Another gut feeling,” he said.

  “What about it?”

  He scraped his top teeth over his bottom lip a few times, never losing eye contact. I’d begun to burn so hard with pine I felt like I was in a forest. I half expected to see a carpet of needles under my feet.

  “What?” I snapped, a little too harsh, but I needed to get the heat off me somehow. The rainbow was threatening—I could feel it.

  “You sure do have a lot of them.”

  “So? I’m intuitive. I’m sure you have a few hunches here and there, too, Detective.”

  He stood up and reached toward me. I stared at his hand, and then reluctantly took it and let him pull me out of the chair. “Exactly,” he said. He didn’t move, so that I was standing only inches away from him, a mirror of the way he blocked me with his body at the hospital the very first time that I’d met him. He was totally not good at personal space. “Have you ever thought about becoming a cop, Nikki?”

  I laughed out loud. Long, hard guffaws that would have doubled me over if I’d had room. Imagine me, a cop. Joining the forces of people who’d only continuously let me down for most of my life.

  Except for him, my brain interrupted. Martinez hasn’t let you down. He wouldn’t.

  Bullshit, I countered. He just hasn’t yet. In the end, everyone lets each other down. The only person I can definitely count on to fight for me is myself.

  The thought sobered me quickly.

  “I didn’t realize I’d told a joke,” he said, turning and moving toward the door.

  “Well, that’s exactly what it is,” I said, following him. “A complete and total joke. No way would I ever become a cop.”

  He turned again and I almost ran full frontal into him. “It’s not like you have a lot of other big plans, right?”

  I pretended to think it over. “Hmm, well, there is this possible job opportunity I have working in a prison for the rest of my life. Which will turn from possible to probable if we don’t get to the bottom of this case and find Rigo Basile. Can we go now?”

  He smiled with only one half of his mouth, as if he were privy to a joke that I couldn’t hear. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Let’s go find us a van.”

  29

  WE WAITED FOREVER, parked around the corner from the front door of Tesori Antico in a car borrowed from one of Martinez’s buddies. I was so sick of waiting and watching and watching and waiting and coming on dead end after dead end. I just wanted this to be over.

  “Maybe we should stand outside or something. Bait them a little,” I suggested.

  “I thought we were trying to keep from being recognized. Standing outside is not very subtle, is it?”

  “Neither is trying to run over two people in a parking lot. Or shooting your brother in your backyard. I would hardly call Luna subtle.”

  “And if it’s not Luna?”

  I shook my head. “It’s her. I know it’s her. Who else could it be?”

  “I’m afraid to start counting possibilities,” he said.

  “Well, as you can see, subtlety is not really my specialty. Which is part of what makes your earlier suggestion so ridiculous.”

  He shifted on the seat and it let out a vinyl groan. “What earlier suggestion?”

  “That I should be a cop.”

  “Ah.” He did a quick visual sweep of the area. “You could get a handle on your subtlety. You’d be good at it.”

  “What, are you an expert on the Inner Workings
of Nikki Kill now? What makes you so sure you know what I would do or how good I would be?”

  He reached forward and flicked on the radio, fiddling with buttons until he landed on some R & B. He turned it down so low it felt almost imaginary. “I used to be just like you.”

  “Excuse me? Back in your gangbanging days, you were like me? I don’t think so.”

  “First of all, I wasn’t a gangbanger.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “You were just banging a gangbanger’s sister. You’re right. Not so subtle.” I grinned.

  He tilted his head sideways and gave me a Really? look. I rolled my hands, gesturing for him to continue. I wasn’t much for listening to stories about people’s glory days, but anything had to be more interesting than watching nothing.

  “I was passionate. Like you. And I had a huge chip on my shoulder.” He poked my shoulder with his forefinger. “Like you. And I was angry.”

  “Gosh, you’re making me sound like such a charmer,” I said. Sarcastic, but on the inside I felt uneasy, because I knew what he was saying was the truth. Even if I didn’t like to hear it.

  “And,” he said, “I watched someone get hurt. Really hurt. And my first instinct was to hurt back, but I knew I couldn’t do it. Our family had been through enough. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that it was somehow my fault or that I should have stopped it or settled the score or . . . just something. I felt like I did nothing, and I couldn’t stand that feeling. I had to do something. To at least feel like I tried.”

  I swallowed. The air in the car had gotten kind of heavy. He was talking about himself, but he was also talking about me. Problem was, I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the me who felt helpless to stop my mom’s murder, or if he was talking about the me who needed to do something about Peyton’s. And how sick and fucked up was it that I had a menu of murders in my life to choose from?

  He shifted again, traced the stitching on the steering wheel with his forefinger. “So I became a cop. And I worked my ass off. And I put everything I had into it. And now . . . now I feel like I can do something. You know what I mean?”