Crush (15 page)

This time Gail spoke. “You already guessed that.”

“I know,” Amelia said, flatly.

“You already guessed that twice.”

She shrugged and said, “Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with the lead pipe.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“'Cause I think Colonel Mustard did it. With the lead pipe. In the Conservatory.”

“I showed you the lead pipe.”

“I know.”

“Before that I showed you the Conservatory.”

“I know.”

“Then why—”

“How do I know you're not an accomplice? How do I know you two aren't in cahoots?”

“Look, if you don't want to play.…”

“I want to play. I want to solve this crime. I want to find out who killed Mr. Body. You're the one who's crapping out on this. What exactly do you have to hide?”

“Amelia.…”

“Once again I ask: Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with the—”

There was a crash from downstairs. Gail was almost relieved to hear it—it meant a distraction from dealing with this angry, young, and extremely annoying girl. She gestured for Amelia to be silent and moved to the door.

As she slipped silently down the hall, Gail reflected on the probable causes of the noise down in the dojo. It might be the neighborhood kids trying to kick in the window and rob the place, for instance. They did that a couple of times when Gail first moved in, but she'd caught them at it and given them a few lessons in street fighting. They pretty much left the dojo alone after that.

On the other hand, it might be a panicked raccoon trying to find a safe haven from the city streets. That
had happened once, too, and Gail had trapped it, fed it a can of tuna, and sent it on its way. Strays had to stick together.

Or it might be a gang of Russian goons trying to take Amelia. You just never knew.

When she saw the big men rushing up the stairs toward her, Gail had her answer. She took a split second to acknowledge that before knocking the lead one out with a leaping sidekick to the head and sending him tumbling back onto the others. How many others there were, she couldn't say. She stopped counting at seven.

She thought of turning and running. She thought of yelling a warning to Amelia. She disregarded those thoughts immediately. When you're on the run you can be caught. When you cry out a warning to someone, all you do is let the hunter know they're close to their prey. No, the only thing to do when being attacked was to attack back. Harder.

She knew she could hold them off for few minutes at best, enough time for Amelia to hear them breaking up the place and slip out the back window to the street before they took Gail down. True, Gail was probably a better fighter than any of them, so if they attacked her one at a time, the way they did in the movies, she could whip them all and finish by standing victorious over their broken bodies. But as she dived into the tangled mass of Russian mobsters, she realized they probably had seen those same movies. They wouldn't make the same mistake as Bruce Lee's assailants or
Chuck Norris's assailants or Jet Li's assailants or Jason Statham's assailants. They wouldn't stand and wait their turn. They'd take her all at once.

Fucking reality.

SEVENTEEN

M
y friends will meet you on the next floor.” The man with the skeleton tattoo (whose name was Sergei) listened to the man with the ring tattoos (whose name was Danzig) on his Bluetooth and rolled his eyes.

That was supposed to be Sergei's cue to take action, he thought, facing the elevator doors with that hulking lunk Semyon by his side. But did Danzig have to deliver it with that Blofeldian smirk? Not for the first time, Sergei wondered what kind of
bratva
he had gotten himself into.

Sergei hadn't even wanted to be a gangster. It was just the only way he could get from Tkibuli, that west Georgian shithole he was born in, to Los Angeles, where he could realize his dream. To be Phil Spector.

Phil Spector of the Wall of Sound. Music producer extraordinaire, yes. Also the Phil Spector who could pick up a blonde at the House of Blues, take her home to his castle in Alhambra, have sex with her, blow her brains out, and get off with a mistrial. That was the
high life, no question.

Sergei loved music, mixing sounds and beats together and making them collide, almost as much as he loved killing people. Maybe more. And that was saying a lot. Because killing people, watching the life go out of their faces, hearing their last breath, that really got Sergei's juices flowing. But to combine the two, music and death? That took balls of bronze.

True, Spector had been convicted on the second pass, but by then Sergei was already in L.A., indentured to Tarzan Ivankov. As a henchman. Sergei had been unfamiliar with the term till one of Tarzan's whores called him that. He'd slapped her (open handed—he wasn't
that
mad) when she used the word, because it didn't sound complimentary. He asked her what it meant, and since she was an American whore from Canada, unlike most of Tarzan's stable, she was able to explain: “It's like one of those guys in an action movie that works for bad guy and gets shot and nobody minds.” So that was what a henchman was. Interesting. He hit her again, this time with his closed fist. Still, she had a point, and he felt a little bad about it afterward.

So he was a henchman, Sergei thought. Okay. For now. You had to start somewhere. He spent his spare time in clubs, listening to all the lousy bands and imagining fixing them, making them better, giving them the Wall of Sound.

“It's here,” Semyon growled the obvious, as always.

The elevator doors slid open. They had to be quick about this. People were already gathering in the street around the body of that prick Danzig had dropped out of the other elevator a floor above them. Danzig, with his damn ring tattoos (a ring for every man he'd killed, as he'd explained far too often for it to be cool), had perhaps taken too literally Tarzan's order to “put him down.” No matter. Danzig was running down the service stairs now, trying to get outside before the cops got here and the building was sealed. So the lowly henchman were given the next assignment: Kill this man they called Crush, the man who'd done so much damage to them in the parking lot of the Nocturne. Kill him in the elevator quickly and efficiently and get out.

But when the doors opened, the elevator was empty. Sergei stepped in, looking all around, and then turned back to look at Semyon, who looked as puzzled as Sergei was, when the elevator doors started to close. Sergei reached out to stop the doors when an angry two-hundred-twenty-pound bald man dropped down from the sky on top of him.

Crush.

As the door slid shut, Sergei noted that although he had looked all around for someone, he hadn't looked up. Rookie henchman mistake, he thought, as Crush rained his fists down on him.

As Rush was beating this Russian mobster to a pulp, taking the gun from his hand and beating him some more, he noticed something. The man wasn't fighting back. Rush paused as he recognized him. Skeleton Tat. From the club.

“You all right?” he asked, in Russian.

“You win,” the man answered in a thick Georgian accent. Eastern Europe Georgia, not southern U.S. Georgia. Though both had their coal mines. And from the look of this man's hands, he knew them well.

“That's it?” Rush asked.

“Yeah…don't kill me.”

“You were going to kill me.”

“Just doing my job.”

“It's a lousy job.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, I'm not going to kill you.”

“Thanks.”

“You'd still kill me if you had the chance, though, right?”

“Well, orders. You know.”

The elevator doors slid open. “Tenth floor. You get off here.” Rush half rolled, half pushed Skeleton Tat out of the elevator. “I'll tell Tarzan you put up more of a fight.”

“I don't fight when I know I'm going to lose. Waste of energy.”

“Wise man,” Rush said as the doors closed.

It took an eternity to get down to the garage level,
where the police were just arriving. They were just starting to shut the building down but hadn't yet gotten to the service entrance. Rush ran through it, his heart pounding in his chest. He had to contact Gail. He had to know if she was all right.

As he ran to the car on Flower Street, he dialed her number furiously on his cell phone. It rang and rang, until her voicemail answered. He called again and again. Always with the same result.

He started the car and sped down Flower, turning onto 4th as he called the police and told them there was an assault taking place at Gail's dojo. The officers would probably get there before him, so if he was wrong, if Gail and Amelia were working out and she was just letting the machine take the calls, Gail would make Rush do Palgwe forms till the sun came up. But if he was right.…

It took him six and a half minutes to get there, dodging traffic, tearing through red lights. Pulling up in front of the dojo, he saw that the front window was busted in and the cops were nowhere in sight. LAPD, to serve and protect—in their own good time.

Rush ran through the broken plate-glass window, calling out, “Gail! Amelia!” No answer.

The dojo had been wrecked. Benches overturned, mirrors shattered, punching bag slashed. Rush didn't pause to assess the damage. He just ran up the stairs, flipping the light switches as he passed. They didn't come on. The bulbs had all been shattered.

The kitchen was untouched and empty. He heard faint music coming from the bedroom down the hall. Walking toward it, he checked the closet. Empty. He checked the bathroom. Empty, but the sink was filled with bloody water, and bloodstained towels were strewn around the room. Gail hadn't gone down without a fight.

The bedroom door was closed. He swung it open with a lump in his throat. The room was in shambles. The bed was turned on its side, the card table was tossed into the corner, the Clue game board and pieces scattered around it—a rope, a knife, a lead pipe, a revolver—like so much evidence in a tiny crime scene.

Gail's iPod was plugged into its speakers. Belle & Sebastian were playing. “It's been a bloody stupid day.…”

There was a card on the windowsill, where he couldn't miss it. It was Miss Scarlet. Gail's favorite. Across it was scrawled a phone number.

“Don't leave the light on, baby,” the iPod sang. Anger flaring in his gut, Rush snatched the iPod from its cradle and made to throw it across the room. He stopped himself just in time. For the sake of Gail's playlists.

He took a deep breath, then pulled out his cell phone and dialed the number that was written on the card. Slowly and deliberately. He didn't want to enter the wrong numbers.

The phone rang. And rang.

Then he heard it. The faint sound of a cell phone ringing somewhere nearby. In the apartment.

He followed the sound. Followed it downstairs. Followed it across the darkened dojo to the equipment closet in the corner.
Dear God
, Rush thought,
don't let this be what I think it's going to be.

EIGHTEEN

R
ush hadn't screamed since he was a child. That was during the bad times, when his mother had to turn tricks in their one-bedroom apartment off Cherokee and she'd lock him in the closet with a blanket and pillow and tell him to keep quiet till it was over. One time he'd heard her panting and struggling and gasping for breath, as if someone was strangling her and pounding the hell out of her at the same time—which, he later reflected, was basically what was going on. He knew he had to help her. So he'd screamed at the top of his lungs and pounded on the door. How his mother had whipped him for that!

Of course, it wasn't nearly the whipping she'd given her john when he suggested little Caleb join them for a three-way. A mother bear protects her cubs even if the mother bear is selling her ass on Hollywood Boulevard.

So that was the last time Rush screamed, and he didn't scream now as he looked in the closet. He just gave out a low, blood-chilling moan.