Jesse reached the deck and sat on the edge. I tossed him the towel.
Van Heusen stood over him. ‘‘Stu Pyle drowned in his own blood with a plumber’s snake jammed down his esophagus.’’
Jesse looked up. ‘‘You must be Agent Van Heusen.’’
‘‘When’s the last time you spoke to Franklin Brand?’’
‘‘When he was trying to beat the snot out of me at Evan’s house.’’
Van Heusen looked down. ‘‘This needs to be a serious conversation. Get real.’’
‘‘I am. What’s this about?’’
‘‘It’s about me guessing that you don’t want to end up like Stu Pyle. No matter how bad your life is, it has to be better than having a feces-stained metal cable stuffed down your throat. Though I have to say, your life doesn’t look too bad.’’ He gazed at the house. ‘‘I bet you’d hate to lose all this.’’
Jesse squinted at him. ‘‘Evan tells me you’re a CPA. Are you with the financial crimes section?’’
‘‘What a smart guy. Keep guessing.’’
Agent Fiori rubbed his forehead and said, ‘‘Come on, Dale.’’
Van Heusen ignored him. ‘‘Here’s a hint. Let’s talk about Mickey Yago.’’
Inside the house, the phone rang. All three cops turned at the sound. Jesse gave me a glance. I took it to mean that he didn’t want them to overhear any phone messages, and I went in just as Adam’s voice came on the machine.
‘‘Call me,
jefe.
We have a problem. The—’’
I picked up. ‘‘Jesse can’t talk. What’s up?’’
‘‘Lieutenant Rome stopped by my place half an hour ago, with the FBI.’’
‘‘They’re here now.’’
‘‘Stu Pyle getting murdered—Lord God, it’s horrible. I knew if Brand got out of jail awful things would happen.’’
I looked outside. Jesse had pulled up into the chair but Van Heusen was still looming over him, talking down at the top of his head.
Adam said, ‘‘This scares me. Jesse’s the only witness left, and the police don’t believe the danger. And they seem to have forgotten Isaac was a victim.’’ Anger edged into his voice. ‘‘That FBI agent, the one who talks with his nose forward, like he’s sniffing you—Van Heusen. He asked if Isaac had gang connections.’’
I closed my eyes. ‘‘God.’’
‘‘Sandoval, that’s all he needed to hear. A Mexican name, and he was convinced Isaac must have been a gangbanger.’’
‘‘He’s a button-pusher, Adam. He tries to set people off. If he comes back, don’t talk to him.’’
I opened my eyes. Agent Fiori was standing at the sliding glass door, staring at me. Outside, Van Heusen was leaning down, talking into Jesse’s face. The hiss of the surf covered his words. He straightened, spread his hands, as if asking a question. Jesse said nothing.
I said, ‘‘Hang in, Adam. I have to go.’’
Van Heusen shrugged. He nodded to the other two men and they left the way they’d come, around the side of the house. I walked out onto the deck. Jesse didn’t look up. His face, backlit by the glitter of the Pacific, looked stricken.
I started toward him. ‘‘What did Van Heusen say to you?’’
It took him a few seconds to speak. ‘‘That I must know what’s going on with Brand and i-heist.’’ He shut his eyes and shook his head. ‘‘He thinks I must have been helping Brand steal from Mako. That’s what the two hundred K is about.’’ He looked at me. ‘‘He said if I don’t come clean, they’re going to hook me in with these people. They’ll seize my assets.’’
‘‘What?’’
‘‘Van Heusen thinks I’m part of a criminal enterprise. They can seize any assets I gained as part of that enterprise. ’’
My toes wanted to cramp. ‘‘That’s outrageous. He thinks that because Mako settled with you, he can clean you out?’’
‘‘That’s exactly what he thinks. And he can do it, if he tries hard. He could take my house, my car, my bank accounts. He could ruin me.’’
‘‘What does Van Heusen want you to do?’’
‘‘He wants me to snitch on Brand and i-heist. How can I do that? Fucking hell. He could take it all, Ev. I’d spend years fighting it. I could end up on the street.’’
We stared at each other, immobile with shock. The surf frothed beyond us.
Franklin Brand almost took Jesse from me once. The thought that he might try to finish the job hit me like a hammer. The fact that the authorities didn’t seem to care made me want to beat the hell out of them. I had to do something, anything, find a way to get them to protect Jesse. I needed help, from any corner.
I went inside and phoned Jakarta Rivera.
‘‘What changed your mind?’’ Jax said.
‘‘I want information. You seem to have it,’’ I said.
She strode up State Street. The sidewalk vista offered mossy tile roofs, skinny latte, and pierced eyebrows. We passed shoppers, tourists, Spanish-style sushi bars, a demented blues guitarist playing for loose change. Jax’s diamonds flashed and her perfume spiced the air.
‘‘Information about us, or about yourself?’’ she said.
‘‘Both. Foremost, I want to know why the FBI is investigating Jesse. I want to know what’s going on with Brand and this i-heist crew.’’
Tim walked next to me, gazing in store windows. ‘‘Tall order.’’
‘‘Hey, in the last week I’ve been robbed and assaulted; Jesse has been beaten up. Franklin Brand has killed two people. He’s at large, he’s out for revenge, and Jesse’s the only witness still alive. The police are treating us like dirt, and a gang of extortionists is demanding two hundred thousand dollars from him in, oh’’—I looked at my watch—‘‘a few hours. So yeah, it’s a tall order. Now give me whipped cream and a cherry on top and get your undercover butts in gear.’’
They both looked at me.
‘‘Help me get Jesse out of this mess and I’ll write your memoirs on spec,’’ I said.
Tim’s cool eyes looked merry. ‘‘When can you start?’’
‘‘As soon as you meet my number one condition.’’
‘‘What’s that?’’
‘‘Prove you’re for real.’’
He said, ‘‘Certify that we were spies? Ah, there’s the rub.’’
‘‘The CIA and British intelligence will neither confirm nor deny whether someone was an agent. So how do you propose to authenticate yourselves?’’ I said.
Jax said, ‘‘Receipts from the Spy Store?’’
‘‘Not funny.’’
Tim said, ‘‘Passports? We have them in multiple names, from various countries.’’
I shook my head. ‘‘Pay enough, anybody can get a forged passport.’’
Jax said, ‘‘These aren’t from British Honduras.’’
I gave her a sharp look, presuming that was a reference to Brand’s phony documents.
Tim said, ‘‘It’s tricky. Exceedingly.’’ His face, so rough and so oddly winning, became reflective. ‘‘Ultimately, verification would come only from an adversary, Evan. The players know each other. You’d have to gain access to an opponent’s files and find a name.’’
‘‘Well,’’ Jax said, ‘‘you might also be able to go to a third-party country, someplace on the chessboard. Their intelligence services might know the players.’’
‘‘Adversary,’’ Tim insisted. ‘‘You’d need to go to a broken country and give them the access code. Which is money. Then you might get the proof you’re after.’’
We walked. That stink of the real was wafting in the air around me.
I said, ‘‘And if I did believe you, what would your story be?’’
Tim said, ‘‘Army sniper school, Secret Intelligence Service, flash cars, knives drawn in the souk.’’
‘‘You talked about private espionage. Were you a mercenary? ’’ I said.
‘‘No.’’
‘‘Industrial espionage?’’
‘‘Hardly.’’
And with that, he veered into a clothing store. Jax and I followed. Clothes were stacked in earth-toned piles around a giant cactus. Tim chose a pair of brown drawstring pants and held them up to his waist.
Jax said, ‘‘Put those down before somebody sees you.’’
He gave her a cutting look. She stepped close to him, and they muttered at each other. Great, just what I didn’t need: spatting spies. I turned away, picking up a beige shirt with an iguana stitched on it.
Jax saw me holding it. ‘‘Uh-
uh
. Get your hands off that.’’
‘‘Not my color?’’
‘‘These clothes are a crime. Shapeless and clinging, guaranteed to make you look like a lumpy pillow.’’ She guided me to the door. ‘‘I swear, Santa Barbara is a style disaster zone.’’
‘‘Hey, we’re casual here,’’ I said.
‘‘So is an unmade bed, but I wouldn’t wear it out to lunch.’’ She led me outside. ‘‘You need fashion reeducation. Repeat after me, slowly:
Prada
.’’
I looked over my shoulder. ‘‘Where’s Tim?’’
‘‘He’ll catch up.’’
I pursed my lips. ‘‘If you two bicker over something as insubstantial as clothing, how will we get through a manuscript?’’
‘‘We’re not bickering; we’re tempestuous.’’
We headed into Saks Fifth Avenue, where the air was cooled to the temperature of crisp French Chablis. She propped her sunglasses atop her head.
‘‘Let me tell you about myself. Father’s from Texas, mother’s a Cuban refugee. I have a linguistics degree and an ability to lie with a fabulous smile.
Cubano
Spanish accent that went down well in certain South American circles.’’
I said, ‘‘Why’d you become a spy?’’
‘‘The shrinks at Langley had a theory. As a child, I witnessed the primal scene.’’
She headed for the belts and scarves, her fingers brushing over silk and leather.
‘‘You know, peering through a crack in the bedroom door at Mom and Dad. Jax Rivera, spy tot.’’
‘‘Why’d you quit?’’ I said.
‘‘One day I found myself out on a limb in Medellín. I was having an affair with an asset, and he betrayed me.’’
She draped a scarf over my shoulder and leaned back to assess the look.
I said, ‘‘What happened?’’
‘‘I killed him.’’
I couldn’t help it; I just stared at her.
She said, ‘‘He was going to shop me to narco-traffickers. It was him or me.’’
‘‘You make it sound easy.’’
‘‘No, it sent me off the deep end. Thank God I met Tim, or I might have hanged myself.’’ She took the scarf from my shoulders. ‘‘You have potential. Look at you, this wonderful bone structure and lean figure. I should take you to Milan.’’
She touched my hair. I brushed her hand away.
I said, ‘‘And what do you plan to title your memoirs,
Kick-Ass in Versace
?’’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘‘Catchy.’’
She walked on, looking at pashminas. They hung on the wall, blue, gold, and purple, the colors lush behind her brown face.
‘‘Damn.’’ My head pounded. ‘‘Damn, stop. Jax, what did you do? Shoot him?’’
‘‘Gave him a joint laced with heroin, and when he fell asleep put a nine-millimeter round through his temple. He never felt a thing. No pain, no remorse.’’
I felt as if a golf ball had lodged in my throat. ‘‘Who was he?’’
‘‘You don’t want to know.’’ She looked past my shoulder. ‘‘And here’s Tim.’’
He walked up, cracking his knuckles, looking at Jax. ‘‘You told her?’’
‘‘Some.’’
He glanced at me. ‘‘You seem displeased.’’
‘‘You could say so.’’
He nodded toward the escalator and I followed him on, heading up. Jax stayed with the pashminas. He watched her, his expression unreadable.
He said, ‘‘I need to explain something to you.’’
‘‘Oh, I think you need to explain a lot of things.’’
‘‘Self-defense can take many forms.’’
‘‘So it can. But to justify killing in self-defense, you have to be in imminent danger. You don’t drug a man unconscious and then put a barrel to his head.’’
‘‘Are you angry that she killed him, or that she slept with him?’’
‘‘Excuse me?’’
We got off the escalator in the women’s department. He said, ‘‘You want proof?’’ He grabbed a hideous sequined jacket off a rack, handed it to me, and pointed across the store. ‘‘Go admire yourself in the mirror over there.’’
‘‘Tim, even Michael Jackson would find this too garish.’’
‘‘Humor me.’’
Though his face was relaxed, his eyes were sharp. I swallowed the snippy remark, headed to the mirror, and held the jacket up to my chest. The sequins were blinding. In the mirror, I watched Tim walk toward the men’s room.
A moment later, I saw a woman get off the escalator. She was young, wiry, wearing gold hoop earrings and a red bandanna over her hair like a do-rag. She followed Tim. Right behind her came Jax, hands full of accessories.
From that point, it was quick. Tim went in the men’s room. Bandanna stopped outside the door. Jax came up behind her, pushed her inside, and shut the door behind her.
I tossed the jacket aside. The bathroom door was locked. I banged on it, hissing, ‘‘Open up,’’ and the lock flipped. Jax thrust her arm through the door and pulled me inside, slamming and locking it again. I opened my mouth and she held up a finger, signaling silence.
The men’s room was splendid. There were flowers on the counter, and Chopin piped in through the speakers, and a shine on the floor, where Bandanna lay facedown, hog-tied.
Jax pointed at the scarf gagging the young woman’s mouth, and the belts cinching her hands and feet.
‘‘Hermès. Gucci. Don’t dis my labels, hon.’’
Tim’s foot was planted between Bandanna’s shoulders. He was going through her wallet. She squirmed on the floor, trying to kick him.
Jax gave her a harsh look. ‘‘Chill. You do not want me to start in on you with a pair of Jimmy Choo stilettos.’’
I said, ‘‘What the hell are you doing?’’
Tim said, ‘‘I saw her down the street, near that cactus-and -drawstring-trousers shop. Watched her in the reflection off the windows, keeping pace with us.’’
I felt numb. I got it now. Jax and Tim hadn’t been arguing—Tim had dropped back behind this woman to check her out.
I said, ‘‘She was following you?’’
Tim looked up. ‘‘No. She was following you.’’