‘Jade,’ he said. ‘I need to ask you a favor, and you’re going to think it’s silly, but I’m serious about this.’
‘Oo-kay...’
He slid a business card across the table. On the back he’d written down an e-mail address and the name Parawat Ratanaruang.
‘If you don’t hear from me for more than a couple of days, can you get in touch with her and let her know the worst has happened.’
‘Is this your wife?’ Because, you know, I mean. Enough already.
‘A contact who is working the case with me.’
‘Oh, right. Sure. So let me get this straight. If you don’t call me for... how long? Two days? I’m supposed to e-mail a total stranger and tell her I think you’re dead? You’re kidding, right? Because you know none of this is my business and there’s no way I’m doing that.’
‘Please, don’t be like that, Jade. Because—and I don’t mean to be macabre—but there might not be anything left of me to find. She needs to know.’
‘Shea, listen. This is too much. I mean, I barely know you.’
He reached across the table and touched my hand.
‘That’s not true. You do know me. There’s a reason we’ve met. I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it’s there.’
So... when he touched me? It’s not like we’re talking sparks, or electricity, or anything like that. It was more like... a melting sensation. I’m sitting there across from him and outside it’s dark now. It’s started to rain, and the highway is a blur of light. There’s noise everywhere, but between the two of us there’s a kind of stillness.
‘Have a look at this,’ he said. And he passed me his phone with a photograph displayed on the screen.
It was a skinny white guy, about fifty. Judging by the style of clothes, the picture must have been about fifteen years old. He was posed with a teenage girl who was tall enough to be a model. It looked like they were at a nightclub. She was heavily made up and wearing a short skirt and heels and a little fur jacket that she clutched around herself for protection. Fantastic beauty, but there was something else about her that made me stare at her and not at the man. She was familiar.
I knew that face. Where did I know her from?
Then my gecko tattoo started itching.
I stood up. ‘Gotta pee,’ I blurted. ‘Back in a second.’
In the stall I gave the tattoo a really good scratch, but it only itched more. I came out of the stall and washed my hands, glaring at myself in the mirror. Malu would kill me for getting involved with this guy.
You have an instinct for trouble,
she’d say.
It’s like a metal detector, only less profitable
.
I scratched a few more times. Then I opened the bathroom door and stepped into the little hallway between the main part of the diner and the back entrance. A gunshot snapped off in the diner and glass shattered.
‘Everybody down!’
I startled but stayed put. There was a scrambling sound, then a hush. Through the round window in the swinging door that led to the diner, I glimpsed a dude in a jacket and balaclava moving past, hands extended in front of him gripping the gun. Under his jeans he had thighs like an oak tree.
I went out the back door into the darkness, then ran around to the front of the building, keeping my head down.
Everything inside the diner was lit up, so it was like watching a movie. None of the customers were visible; they all must be down under the tables or on the floor. The shooter had Shea by the hair and was pushing him toward the door. I scanned the parking lot. The black Nissan SUV was parked crooked, pointing toward the highway. Engine running, driver with his hood up.
I stumbled across the broken pavement, ducking behind parked cars, looking for a weapon. Any weapon. I fumbled at the pieces of broken asphalt but couldn’t get a grip; then I saw a socket wrench, left behind by one of the workmen. It gleamed in the streetlights like friggin’ Excalibur.
The gunman hustled Shea across the parking lot. I ran along parallel to them, staying down, until they’d reached the SUV. Then I darted up behind Shea’s attacker. The gunman put his gun in his belt while he opened the back door of the car, keeping hold of Shea’s hair with his other hand. He still didn’t know I was there, and I’d been careful to keep out of line of sight of the driver.
You get one shot at this, Jade.
Gripping the wrench in both hands, I leaped up and clubbed him on the back of the head. Right behind the ear.
He went down like a sack of shit. I grabbed the gun, screamed, ‘Run, Shea!’ and shot out both tires on the passenger side.
Shea ran. But instead of running somewhere smart, like across the parking lot to the gas station next door where they’d have a panic button and lots of cameras, he ran along the shoulder of the highway in the other direction. Towards a little patch of scrubby woods where the highway bridged a big ditch with a stream in it. Meanwhile, the driver was getting out of the SUV and I was going to have to shoot him before he shot me.
All right. If that’s the way it is.
I was about to squeeze when it hit me that he was ignoring me. He ran after Shea. Firing his Glock the whole time. I couldn’t see his face, but from the shape of his body I was pretty sure this was Pierce—or Johnny, as Malu had heard him called. I didn’t wait around for the first guy to come to. I chased after Pierce/Johnny, who chased after Shea, who by now had reached the highway bridge and disappeared down into the ditch. I couldn’t tell whether he’d fallen or jumped.
I couldn’t shoot and run at the same time. In fact, I couldn’t shoot, period, not over any kind of distance. I’d handled guns and I’d fired a few, and I knew just enough to know that I didn’t have a prayer of hitting Johnny at this distance. So I just ran after him anyway, because that’s the kind of thing you do if you’re me. He turned once and shot at me. The bullet hit the pavement near my feet and that was enough to send me reeling sideways to take cover behind a pickup. He was already back on his target. He fired another shot in my general direction, probably to cover himself as he climbed over the guard rail and disappeared down into the culvert.
I really didn’t know what to do then. People were coming out of the diner now. I could hear shouts, and I saw that men were surrounding the fallen body of the would-be kidnapper. I’d lost the advantage, lost what little control I had. I had to go down into that ditch, but I didn’t want to. Give me a dark alley any day. Woods always remind me of movies where psycho killers jump out and chop you up in little pieces. Where you gonna run for help in the woods? Who can save you? Nobody will even find your body. The woods are too freaky for me.
But I couldn’t stay here. Police were coming. People would be asking questions. It didn’t matter that I was a good guy this time; I was going to end up in big trouble. Everything about the situation was telling me to turn back and leave it alone.
Guess that’s why I jumped over the guard rail and slithered down the bank into the trees.
There was water at the bottom. The stream flowed between steep banks lined with maples and sumac and thorns. The strip of land was only about forty feet wide, and it looked like the developers couldn’t be bothered to do anything with it, so they just left it alone and built around it. The stream was channelled into a pipe about three feet in diameter where it passed under the road, but the water wasn’t more than a few inches deep. It was too dark to see, but I could hear the sound of shots hitting the inside of the concrete pipe, and I knew that the two of them were in there.
Damn. If it passed right the way under the highway, that pipe would be more than fifty feet long and not big enough to stand up in. How could Shea not get shot full of holes?
I went right up to the opening and peered around the edge. Complete darkness. I whipped my head away, just in case Johnny was still bothering to shoot behind him.
I was going to have to get to Shea from the other end. Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance. After all, if Johnny wanted Shea dead he could have shot him on the spot in the diner. Johnny wanted Shea alive. If I was fast, I could catch them at the other end.
I scrambled back up and made a dash through the traffic. Got to the central meridian, climbed over the barrier, and stood there waiting for my opening. It took several seconds to come, and as I took off across both lanes of eastbound traffic I realized how tired I was, how much my legs were letting me down. All that lactic acid was weighing on me.
But I made it. A truck horn blared as I skittered down the bank on the opposite side. Here the slope was less steep, and instead of a wooded culvert there was only a gravelled ditch, man-made, that took the outflow from the pipe. I positioned myself so I was standing on top of the pipe where it opened out.
Someone was coming out as I got there. I couldn’t tell in the dark whether it was Shea or Johnny. The edges of the man seemed blurry, almost like he was oozing black smoke. My eyes must be going. Then I saw he was dragging a limp man and I didn’t wait another second. I jumped on his back, knocking him to the ground. I ended up straddling his back. I had the gun to his head and I was telling myself to pull the trigger before he could turn over, when the black smoke dissipated and my vision seemed to clear.
I shrieked. ‘Shit, it’s you!’
‘Mmmfff,’ Shea said. I rose and backed away shaking, still pointing the gun at him because I couldn’t figure out what was going on. The other man’s body lay half in and half out of the pipe, his arms thrown wide. No sign of the gun.
Shea picked himself up and I bent over the shooter. Pulled off the balaclava.
Under the mask Johnny’s face was covered with blood. His throat was a mess. Ripped open. Blood everywhere. His eyes were wide, staring up at the orange clouds.
Girl in a Red Dress
I
WAS STILL
holding the second gun. Blue police lights reflected off the frontage of Auto Parts Galaxy. Sirens.
‘You killed a man.’
I sounded so calm. Shea took in the sight of the dead guy. He started to back away, holding his hands in front of him as if to ward off the truth.
‘I d-d-didn’t...’ His teeth were chattering. He was going to pieces.
‘Shh! OK, calm down. What’s done is done. The cops will be here any second. You need to calm down.’
I looked at the gun in my hand. My prints would be all over it, and my prints were on file with the police already. Of course, if they dusted down the diner they’d get prints, too. A vision of Perez floated into my mind. He was shaking his head like a disappointed altar boy.
I’d saved Shea’s life. I didn’t have anything to apologize about.
But who was Shea, really? And what had happened in that tunnel?
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what this is about, but I’m fighting the biggest match of my life next week, and I can’t afford to get in trouble.’
‘What?’ His eyes moved all around, looking at everything and nothing. Like he’d just landed from the mothership. For a second I’d been afraid he would do something to me—who knew what he might be capable of, if he’d actually turned the gun around on his attacker? But the Shea I was looking at couldn’t be capable of violence. He looked like he didn’t even know his own name.
‘I’m going to go talk to the police and hand in the gun,’ I continued. ‘You coming, or you going to wait for them to catch you? Personally, I suggest you cooperate. It was self-defense, and you got plenty of witnesses saw them take you at gunpoint.’
He looked horrified and shook his head. ‘No. No police. Jade—don’t leave me!’
I narrowed my eyes. It was like he was on drugs or something.
I put out my hand, saying ‘stop.’ He stopped, his face anguished.
‘You can’t run from this,’ I said. ‘Whatever happened here, the police are on the scene. Don’t resist. This is America. They’ll shoot you. Understand?’
He nodded woodenly, scared.
‘Come on,’ I said.
I talked to the police while wolfing down two more turkey sandwiches. The whole thing took hours because they didn’t believe me but couldn’t figure out what had really happened (neither could I). The CCTV footage would back up what I told the detective about my part in the whole thing, but when I told him about the socket wrench he looked at me like I had to be making it up. The police were talking to Shea separately. There were plenty of witnesses from the diner. The waitress who’d been through the whole thing was giving cops coffee now.
‘You were fierce,’ she whispered. And to the cop, ‘You should give her a medal. She was fierce.’
I told the detective that I’d lost Johnny in the tunnel, and when I found Shea, Johnny was already dead. While I was going through every detail of this, and reminding myself to skip the part about black smoke and Shea not knowing where he was, Shea himself was getting bundled into a police car. I hoped he’d be all right. I told myself he was lucky to be alive, that nothing else much mattered.
The guy I’d clocked on the head was taken away in cuffs. I didn’t recognize him. Which meant the third man from the apartment was still on the loose, and he wasn’t going to be happy with me.
What the hell shit was I in the steaming middle of?
It was after midnight when Malu showed up to take me home. The look on her face made me cringe.
‘You’re coming to Teaneck until after the fight,’ she said. ‘Nothing to discuss. I know you want to stay with Mr. B but under the circumstances...? If any of this criminal activity might possibly have anything to do with your gym, then we have to keep you safe.’
‘Malu, I can’t stay in Teaneck. I’ll be fine. You know I can take care of myself. Did the police tell you what happened? Criminals should be afraid of me, not the other way around.’
‘Yeah, sure, whatever you want to tell yourself.’
‘Malu, I need to ask you something. That reporter guy who came to the gym, the one I told you about.’
‘The hot one?’
‘Yeah, whatever. He thinks Mr. B might be involved in something pretty bad. I know he’s wrong. I know Mr. B is straight up. And I know Coat and Pook are... well, they’re the salt of the earth. But I have to talk to Mr. B myself, and I can’t do that if I’m staying in Teaneck.’