Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot Part 9

He shook himself like a horse feeling a fly on its skin. "No," he said.

"Don't be stubborn about it. The sooner you fall asleep"-a safer-sounding term than go under-"the sooner we can both get on with our lives. Okay?"

"Mm-hmmm." His head tipped forward, but he felt it and shook himself, like a student trying not to fall asleep during a lecture.

"Joel."

"S'hard, I'm sitting up, I can't just go to sleep this way."

"What if," I said slowly, "just to speed this along, I sit next to you, so you can lean on me?" I went to settle down at his side, carefully keeping the Browning on the far side of my body, just in case. "Here," I said, "slide your hips forward a little, if you can, so you're kind of leaning back, and then rest your head on my shoulder. That might help."

Joel shifted in place, doing as I asked. "Your shoulder's bony," he complained quietly.

"Sorry."

For a few long moments, he didn't say anything, and I hoped he was finally dropping off. But then he spoke again. "Can I tell you something? On the job, I ..." Then he stopped.

"You what?"

"No, I shouldn't be telling you this."

"Telling me what?"

He said, "The job ... I think I do it pretty well, but I have to swallow a lot of fear. There's no one I can tell. On the job n.o.body talks about being afraid. S'like I'm the only one."

Whatever he'd been about to tell me, this wasn't among the possibilities I'd considered.

"Uh, you're not," I managed finally. "I mean, everyone feels afraid sometimes."

"No. Not like this."

"I, uh ..." How big a hypocrite was I, trying to address this? "Sure they do." It sounded unconvincing even to my own ears.

Then I noticed that Joel's respiration had become slow and steady. I carefully pulled away, letting his head drop to his chest.

I took the handcuff key, unlocked his wrists, and lowered him gently to the floor. Then I took his right arm in my hand, two fingers on the radial artery, checking the pulse against his watch. It was fifty-two. Low, but not dangerous. He was probably a runner. He could probably get down to the fifties every night in normal sleep.

Before I left, I went through his bag again and found the pick gun that Joel had been telling me about. It didn't look like a gun, really-more like a price-tag applicator in a supermarket, except made of metal, with the slender pick protruding from the business end. I slipped it into my pack. Magnus was going to be p.i.s.sed at his young a.s.sistant, but I was working with a lot more disadvantages than they were, and I needed all the help I could get.

14.

Sometime in the night, the media had discovered what Ford and Joel Kelleher already knew. When I woke up, Serena was reading the story in the Chronicle: SLAYING SUSPECT WAS USMA CADET.

"You're getting more famous by the day," she said, wet black hair pinned up atop her head. She'd already taken a shower; scented humidity hung in the air.

"Looks that way."

"And," she said, "you ditched me last night. Pendeja."

"You were sleeping."

"I was supposed to be your backup."

"You were sleeping," I repeated. "You can't actually be complaining that I left you in a warm bed at midnight instead of taking you across town to stand around in the dark."

Actually, she was right. Leaving her had been a big mistake. If I'd had a lookout last night, I would have gotten out of the Eastman place before Joel was in. Now Ford's right-hand man knew I was up here in San Francisco. Was I going to have to look over my shoulder for him everywhere I went?

"What?" Serena said. "You look kinda funny."

"Thinking," I said, dismissing that train of thought. "Let me see the paper."

Details were pretty thin about my West Point career; the Army's famous dislike of dealing with civilian reporters was working in my favor.

Of more interest, at least to me, was a related story on CNN: With banks once again open for business, details were coming out about Eastman's accounts. As Tess had predicted, there had been "irregularities." Apparently "Hailey" had written herself four checks on Eastman's account on Thursday and Friday, cashing them at different bank branches. Each of the checks was for an amount just shy of five thousand dollars, the level that triggered bank oversight. In addition, there had been large purchases made with Eastman's Visa and American Express cards those same days, at Neiman Marcus and Macy's and a lowerMarket Street jewelry store.

I kicked off covers and went to pour myself a cup of coffee from the little machine on the counter.

"So how did it go last night?" Serena said. "Was it interesting?"

"You can't imagine," I said dryly, tipping my face down into my cup.

"Yeah? What'd you learn?"

s.h.i.t. I didn't really want to tell her about Joel; it'd freak her out. I sipped coffee and backtracked. "I was being ironic. It was a wash. Everything interesting has been cleaned out."

"Mmm," she said, and then, "So what's the plan today?"

"Surveillance," I said. "If Joe Laska is working out of Skouras's old offices, we might be able to catch my good friend Quentin coming and going from there. This is going to be the boring part, surveillance."

"That's okay," Serena said, "as long as I get to be there when things do get interesting. Like when you're ready to throw down on this guy."

"Sure thing."

"I mean it, Insula. No 'This part's too dangerous, go wait at the hotel' s.h.i.t."

"Be careful what you wish for," I said. "You remember who these guys are. They're heavy. If we don't have to mix it up with them, we shouldn't." I drained the last of the coffee. "Let me take a shower, and we'll head out."

That's how we spent the rest of the day: at a discreet distance from Laska's office not far from the Port of San Francisco, watching people arrive and depart. I saw Babyface himself and pointed him out to Serena. Quentin did not appear. At one point I found some scratch paper and tried to draw him from memory, an exercise that reminded me I couldn't draw at all. Serena smoked cigarettes and fielded occasional phone calls and slipped away to talk in private; Trece business, I knew.

By seven that evening, we were back at the hotel, eating Indian takeout and watching cable news. I'd been hoping that by the time the prime-time shows were on, I'd have been supplanted by a missing child or a homegrown-terror plot. That wasn't the case. On CNN's marquee crime-news show, generic footage of West Point cadets drilling was intercut with my military ID photo, footage of police activity outside the Eastman house on Friday night, and a brief snippet of Lucius "Luke" Ma.r.s.ellus getting out of a black Escalade and walking into the offices of his record label in L.A.

Ma.r.s.ellus? I set down my plastic fork and looked at the banner at the bottom of the screen. It read, BREAKING NEWS: MURDER SUSPECT HIT, KILLED CHILD IN TRAFFIC ACCIDENT.

"Oh, great," I said.

The show's host was saying, "This terrible story, these two murders up in San Francisco, the story just keeps getting more tangled, everything we hear just keeps getting worse." She spoke not in sentences but in strings of clauses, with drawling emphasis on the key words. "The news late today out of Los Angeles about a traffic fatality in which-"

"Well, you knew that s.h.i.t was gonna come out," Serena said philosophically.

"Yeah, I guess," I said.

On the screen the host was now talking to a remote guest, identified as a "psychologist and popular author." Serena was about to speak again, but I held up a silencing hand.

"Now, Dr. Schiffman," the host said, "what we're hearing about this young woman, this suspect, more and more we're seeing a picture of someone whose life has gone very wrong, who set herself this very high goal of going to the U.S. Military Academy and then failed at that; she later, for whatever reason, is responsible for the death of a small child.... Dr. Schiffman, what kind of effect would this string of, I guess you'd say missteps and failures, have on the psyche of a young person like Hailey Cain?"

The psychologist, a man with very short, curly hair and round gla.s.ses, cleared his throat. "Well, I think it's important first to remind everyone that Cain is still a suspect, she hasn't been tried or found guilty-"

"Of course, of course."

"-and that the Wilshire Boulevard accident was found not to be her fault. But with those ... uh, caveats, you'd have to say that the failure to complete West Point and then the death of this child, those kinds of life events at a fairly young age, could have a potentially devastating effect."

"Certainly."

"You could potentially be looking at someone who's saying, 'I've tried hard, I've failed, what's the use?' I mean, particularly someone being the agent of a child's death, and completely by accident, that's someone who could be saying, 'Society's going to look at me like I'm some kind of monster no matter what, so I give up, I'm just going to be as bad as I can be.' I'm not saying that's what happened here, but it could be."

"So you're saying that this could be someone who just snapped."

"That's entirely possible."

West Point and Wilshire Boulevard-they were the two turning points of my adult life, the two points that allowed these people who'd never met me to triangulate, to plot out my psyche like they were laying out a map.

"For G.o.d's sake," I told Serena, "the Eastman thing was obviously a planned-out, long-term crime, moving into an old lady's house and embezzling her money. That's not 'snapping.' "

"They gotta make it interesting," Serena said.

Finally the news shifted to an update about a missing woman in South Carolina. Serena muted the TV and turned her full attention to her food. I tried to do the same, but I wasn't very hungry.

I went to bed early that night, to make up for the sleep I'd missed the night before, in St. Francis Wood with Joel. But instead I fell into that dark, dreamless, not-quite-asleep state for I don't know how long, coming fully to consciousness at the sound of Serena shaking an Ambien out of the bottle I'd left at bedside.

Eventually I succ.u.mbed, dreaming that I was far from California and my troubles. Instead I was on an African beach, alone with CJ.

15.

The next day we sighted Quentin Corelli, driving a dark sedan that he parked outside the Laska offices. I'd almost forgotten the way he moved, light on his feet and c.o.c.ky. And I hadn't expected the extent to which I bristled on seeing that, an almost literal hackles-of-the-neck feeling. b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I thought, you haven't changed.

"a.s.shole," Serena said next to me, as though she saw as much to hate in him.

Around midday he left Laska's offices, and we followed him, Serena at the wheel. We tailed him to the south part of San Francisco, near Candlestick Park. It was a mixed-use neighborhood, residential and light-industrial, where there was so little traffic on the streets that Serena dropped back for fear he'd make us. Then Quentin's dark sedan turned left down a narrow driveway that ran alongside a pale blue stucco house. Serena was forced to drive on or be conspicuous in stopping, but I turned in my seat to keep an eye on him. I only saw him getting out of his car, which was sheltered under a carport, before we'd rolled past.

"Go around the block," I told Serena. "We'll scope things out from one street over."

"I can't, it's a dead end."

I looked ahead and saw that she was right; before us was a low fence and some scrubby bushes. "Then go back," I said.

"He's gonna see us."

"Dammit. Stay here a minute," I said.

It was true, he might see us if we turned around right away. But if we stayed idling at the street's dead end, I hoped, he'd go into the house, at which point we could safely backtrack.

I waited, watching the side mirror to see if Quentin or his car emerged from the driveway. Neither did.

"Find a place to park," I said.

Serena made a three-point turnaround and pointed her car back down the street. I studied the house as we went by again. What looked like the main entrance was on the side of the house, facing the driveway, not the street. It had a double-door system: A security door of tightly scrolled metal allowed access to a cavelike entry area, where the resident could stand and unlock his real front door in safety.

"Do you think he lives there?" Serena said, voicing my thought.

I frowned. "I would have thought he'd live somewhere better." Quentin had dressed well every time I'd seen him, and for his home I'd envisioned something downtown and coldly modern, with a neoRat Pack design aesthetic without signs of genuine individual taste.

Serena eased along the side of the road and killed the engine, then fished out her cigarettes and lit up. "So?" she said, exhaling. "What are you gonna do? Wait until he goes out again and search the place?"

"No," I said, almost to myself. "No."

I'd gone to the Eastman place with some stupid, vague idea that I'd find a trace of the grifter, something to help me intuit her ident.i.ty or her direction. Instead I'd found nothing and nearly gotten caught. I was done with pa.s.sive searching for hints and traces. Everything I needed to know was between Quentin Corelli's ears.

"Can I use these?" I pulled a pair of sungla.s.ses, square and glossy black, from the narrow side compartment in the pa.s.senger door.

"For what?"

Sungla.s.ses on, I opened the door and bailed out into the street, Joel's pick gun in my hand.

"Hailey!" Serena complained behind me.

I ran across the street and knelt in front of the security door, sliding the pick in, narrow screwdriver in my other hand, twisted like a tension wrench.

The lock didn't give. I blew hair out of my eyes, impatient, tried again.

He's going to hear you. Fine, let him.

The lock on the security door sprang, and I was into the entry alcove. I banged on the door with my fist. "Quentin, it's me," I called, giving my voice a sound of familiarity and ent.i.tlement. "Open up, I need you."

When he opened the door, I had only a second to register his expression-slightly irritated, not recognizing but clearly not threatened by this young brown-haired stranger-and then I said, "Thanks," and swung the pick gun as hard as I could into the bridge of his nose. His eyes crossed, and his body flopped down to the floor like a shark on the deck of a fishing boat. I c.o.c.ked my arm for a second blow, but it wasn't going to be necessary.

"Holy s.h.i.t, Insula," Serena said, coming up behind me.