Crush (7 page)

The GTO pulled into a garage full of rebuilt, half-built, mint-condition muscle cars from the glory days of the performance era. Firebird. Le Mans. Catalina 2 + 2 convertible. Grand Prix. These cars were Rush's passion. He labored over them for years, getting them to top condition, better than the day they rolled off the assembly line. Then he drove them for a few months. Then he sold them. The journey was the reward, as Gail said.

Amelia got out and looked around. “What is this place?”

“I live here.” He tossed over an oily towel for Amelia to cover her tits. He wasn't going to let her distract him that way. “Come on.”

She tied the towel around herself and followed him to the freight elevator. He slid the door open and waited for her to follow him.

She paused. He reached into his pocket, pulled out her gun, and offered it to her, butt end first.

“Make you feel better?” he asked.

She took it, but slipped it into the back of her pants. “A little.”

She got in the elevator, and he slid the door down and pressed twelve.

At thirty-five Zerbe still had a full head of hair. That was really all he had going for him, so he kept it long and styled like a Shakespearean actor's. He wore thick glasses and was fighting a paunch, no matter how many sit-ups he did—which wasn't many and wasn't often. Zerbe had a lot of time on his hands and spent it mostly in regret.

He was sitting in front of his computer, watching faces fly by as the LAPD face-recognition program tried to find a match for the blonde from the Nocturne, and eating a blue cheese and salami sandwich and drinking a diet root beer, when Rush walked in, followed by the pretty blonde herself. Here she was, in the flesh, with only an oily towel covering her upper half. She was even fresher and more beautiful in real life than she was in a Verizon Wireless photograph.

“Brother!” Zerbe said. “You finally brought me something home from work!”

Rush walked into his bedroom without pausing. “Don't talk to her. I'm getting her a shirt and then I'm throwing her out.”

Zerbe looked at Amelia. “Well,
I
like you.” He shouted to Rush. “
I
like her.”

Rush moved from his bedroom to Zerbe's. “Fine, then, I'll give her one of
your
shirts.”

Amelia was taking in the place. The loft's décor was Spartan. Not Spartan like
300
Spartan, with Gerard
Butler wearing a leather diaper and screaming at the top his lungs to a bunch of CGI Persians. Spartan like simple, clean, masculine. Burnished metal sliding panels divided a long, cavernous room into various spaces: bedrooms, kitchenette, living room. A large pool table doubled as dining room table on those rare occasions when Rush or Zerbe entertained. Hoods and side panels from Mustangs, Camaros, and Thunderbirds lined the walls. Martial-arts weapons—nunchakus,
tonfas
, sectional staffs, a bo, a samurai sword—served as the artwork, as did posters of Toshiro Mifune, Sonny Chiba, and Jet Li.

Amelia walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the east wall. The non-brothers lived on the twelfth floor of the American Cement Building, a midcentury warehouse only recently converted to loft apartments. The vast windows of the building were crisscrossed with giant Xs on the outside, making it feel, Zerbe often thought, like they were on the inside of a winning tic-tac-toe game, looking out.

Amelia craned over the top V of one the Xs to see the view of MacArthur Park, a little square of black surrounded by the hideous sprawl of the not-yet-revitalized L.A. area called Westlake. It was a very convenient location. If you wanted to score crack, pick up a hooker, or buy a fake ID, all you had to do was walk out the door. Which was the one thing Zerbe couldn't do.

“Someone left the cake out in the rain,” Zerbe said.
It was his standard joke.

“What?” Amelia asked, with the puzzled look that was the standard greeting to that “MacArthur Park” line. When would Zerbe learn? The ranks of Richard Harris–Jimmy Webb fans were growing thinner with each passing day.

Zerbe's command post was a bank of computers, all set into the wall for easy concealment. His usual position was right there in front of them. Despite his pasty complexion and doughy body, Zerbe cut a rather charming figure, he thought, with Stan Laurel hair and a rakish glint in his eye. He boasted five thousand friends on Facebook alone.

“What's that?” She was looking at a glass panel that was hanging from the ceiling. Projected on it was a live satellite image of Earth.

“It's off a NASA website,” Zerbe explained. “The earth in real time. I call it my ‘you are here' sign.”

She laughed at that. It was a younger laugh than he had expected. Rush came out of Zerbe's bedroom and tossed her a T-shirt. She eyed the design skeptically. “Green Lantern?”

“‘No evil shall escape my sight,'” Zerbe said, pleased that she recognized the design. “We could watch TV,” he said, switching on the flat screen. An old rerun of
Wagon Train
appeared on the screen.

“We're stealing the feed from our next-door neighbor, so we have to watch whatever he watches,” he explained. “He's an old guy, so he mostly watches old
Westerns and infomercials. It makes for interesting viewing.”

Rush didn't want them to start bantering. He turned off the set. “Now, call yourself an Uber.”

“Don't you even want to know why I hired you?”

“She hired you?” Zerbe asked.

“She didn't hire me,” Rush growled. “I only work for people I like.”

“That's not true,” Zerbe said. “You worked for Rob Schneider. You hate Rob Schneider.”

“Doesn't everyone?” he asked.

Amelia didn't like being left out of the conversation. “So you aren't even curious why someone was trying to abduct an eighteen-year-old girl?”

She was eighteen? Rush and Zerbe were silent for a moment. Then Rush told her to get the shirt on immediately.

The computer beeped, letting them know there was a match from the face-recognition program. Amelia turned to it and looked—on one half of the screen was the photo she'd taken of herself at the Nocturne that evening. On the other half was clearly a mug shot taken about six months before. She was smiling in both of them.

“What is that?”

Zerbe explained that it was LAPD's face-recognition program.

“Are you supposed to have access to that?” she asked.

“No.”

“Cool.”

Zerbe read the information provided. Amelia Lynn Trask. Juvie record for shoplifting, driving under the influence without a license, possession of narcotics. All-around naughty girl. Surely there was something Zerbe could repeat in mixed company. Ah, here it was….

“Stanley Trask's daughter. Isn't he in jail yet?”

“He was never charged!” she said.

Obviously he'd struck a nerve. He was about to follow up when the door to the apartment crashed in and five men in tactical assault gear burst in.

“Hand over the girl,” the leader of the SWAT team said, though it took Zerbe a second to decipher it, given that the guy's voice was muffled by his helmet.

Rush didn't hesitate. He grabbed his
bo
staff and started swinging. By then Zerbe was up to speed and dashing to protect Amelia. He hadn't gone two steps when the taser hit him, exactly where you don't want a taser to hit you. It didn't knock him unconscious, but it made him wish it had.

The man who fired the taser was the first one Rush took out. Rush swung the
bo
staff and struck him just below the helmet, cracking his neck. Pivoting, he threw the whole of his weight against the staff, driving it into the Kevlar vest of another assault team member, pinning him against the wall.

“What the hell are you doing?” barked the leader,
more shocked than angry.

“I'm her bodyguard!” Rush yelled.

“What are you talking about?” The assault team leader took off her helmet. “I'm her goddamned bodyguard!” Victoria Donleavy said.

SEVEN

T
he assault team spent a lot of time tending to Stegner, the one who'd gotten the
bo
staff in the neck. A severe case of whiplash was the diagnosis. “Wah-wah,” said Zerbe. “I got a taser in the nuts and I get bupkis.”

“These boys of yours need some training, Donleavy,” Rush said, leaning on the
bo
staff for emphasis.

“They're fired,” Donleavy growled. “Hear that? You're all fired!”

The assault team kept quiet. They were used to Donleavy's rages and knew all would be forgotten in the morning.

Zerbe kept his head between his knees and prayed for time to pass. He had a headache and a stomachache and a ballsache. He felt someone rubbing his back and thanked God for the kind touch. Turning, he saw that it was Amelia. That was even better. Now he had a headache, a stomachache, a ballsache, and an erection.

Donleavy made a call on her cell phone and reported
that Miss Trask had been located, safe and sound. She passed the phone to Amelia. “Your father wants to talk to you.”

Amelia rolled her eyes, took the phone, and said “Hi, Dad,” every inch the petulant teenager. “Yeah, everything's fine.”

Rush shook his head at Donleavy. “I can't believe you're still tea-bagging Stanley Trask.”

“It's called business,” Donleavy said. “You should try it sometime.”

“I'm eighteen!” Amelia cried into the phone. “What if I don't
want
to live under your roof?”

“What's her story?” Rush asked Donleavy.

“She ran off tonight. We used the LoJack in her Porsche to trace her to that nightclub where you work. We found it abandoned.”

“So you thought I snatched her?”

“Let's just say it was an unlikely coincidence. We heard you'd been involved in an altercation there tonight. We posted Stegner outside your place here, just to be sure. He saw you pull in with the girl in the back seat. Naked.”

“Half-naked. You got that, Stegner?”

Stegner rubbed his neck and glared at Rush.

Donleavy took the time to notice Zerbe, bent over, still clutching his chest and feeling bereft now that Amelia had stopped the back rub. “Hey, Zerbe. Do you miss prison?”

He looked up. “I miss the regular routine, but the
sodomy-free showers make up for it.”

Rush moved in front of Donleavy, challenging her. “Tell me to my face you thought I abducted her.”

“You're unstable,” Donleavy snapped back. “You're violent! You have a grudge against the father! You fit the profile!”

“According to the threat assessment team?”

“Yes, according to the threat assessment team. And according to me!”

“She's got a gun in her pants, did you notice that?”

“I suppose you're going to tell me she abducted you?”

Amelia screamed into the phone, “I'm not coming home!” She threw the phone across the room, smashing it against the burnished steel wall. It fell in pieces on the concrete floor.

“That's my phone!” Donleavy cried.

“She has trouble with the concept of other people's stuff,” Rush said.

Donleavy grabbed her by the arm. “Come on, Miss.”

She pulled her arm away. “No!”

Rush stepped between Donleavy and Amelia. “I'm taking her home.” Amelia looked at him in surprise. “She hired me,” Rush said.

Zerbe shook his head. This was how his non-brother always got into trouble. The combination of a soft heart and a stubborn head would be his undoing one day.