Crush (4 page)

Rush lay on the asphalt, looking up at the tan-gray sky that passes for night in L.A. He thought,
This is going to hurt in the morning
. Then he laughed as he realized how much it hurt right now. He pulled himself to his feet, peeling a shredded piece of T-shirt from the pavement burn on his shoulder and silently cataloging his other injuries. He tried to use his Zen meditation training to stop them from hurting. It didn't work.

The spectators were still there—farther back, but watching the show. The party girls were going to have more Crush stories to share. One girl was missing, though. The one with the blond hair and the hungry eyes, the object of this whole mess. Rush smiled and noticed to his surprise that he still had all his teeth—even the fake ones. The underage boy was gone too—he must have used the distraction to take his broken arm home. Rush wondered what story he'd cook up for his parents. He'd probably try one on the underage girl
too, when she woke up. She looked dim enough to believe him.

Gail made her way through the crowd toward him. Great. Now he'd get a review of his performance. Maybe he should have stayed on the Lamborghini.

“He got away,” she said.

Rush wasn't sure who she meant at first—then he realized that Skeleton Tattoo was missing as well. That made it a clean sweep. But at least they hadn't gotten that girl. Whoever the fuck she was.

Before Gail had a chance to say more, Rush spotted something on the pavement. Maybe a shiny distraction would delay the inevitable critique. He picked it up—it was the busted half of the CD. The girl must have dropped it when she made her retreat. He read what was left of the label.

“I wouldn't have pegged them for Adele fans,” he said.

Gail laughed. The critique could wait until their next lesson. For now, she had to take care of his wounds. He tossed the CD shard and walked with her back into the club.

FOUR

G
ail had tended to a wounded Rush before. A couple of years ago, he'd taken a gig protecting a popular female singer from the paparazzi in general and from her ex-husband in particular. The cause of the tug-of-war was the couple's four-year-old daughter. Each claimed the other was an unfit parent. Each was probably right.

The continued stress of the legal battles led the twenty-two-year-old mother and the twenty-four-year-old father to endless nights of clubbing and drinking and drugging, followed by weeks in rehab, followed by more clubbing and drinking and drugging. In the meantime, the daughter spent most of her time with Rush—he felt more like a nanny than a bodyguard. Still, she was a good kid, and she showed a remarkable aptitude for Muay Thai, or at least the kid-friendly version of Thai boxing that Rush practiced with her when playing with Barbie lost its charm.

He was picking the girl up from a play date while
her mom was sleeping off one of her own, when they jumped him. Rush wasn't sure how they knew the girl's schedule—maybe the singer's mom, who, you guessed it, was estranged from her daughter, told the ex-husband, thinking she'd get to see her granddaughter more if he got sole custody. At any rate, the plan was simple: hire some goons to kidnap the girl, thereby showing that the singer couldn't protect the kid. Maybe the ex-hubby was planning on staging a daring rescue to cement his own cause. He was enough of an idiot to think that would work.

The plan never got that far.

Rush ended up with various cuts and bruises and welts. The would-be kidnappers ended up with seven broken bones between them. The little girl ended up in her crying mother's arms—once Mom had come to. (Mother and daughter moved to New York to get away from it all, and Rush lost the job. Last he heard, the singer and her ex were back together, for the sake of the kid. God help her.)

Rush had come home to his loft in downtown L.A. after the attempted kidnapping, stiff and sore. Gail dropped by later on, with a bottle of healing oil. Rush stripped down and she went to work on him, kneading his tight muscles, digging her elbow into his stiff joints, spreading the warm oil all over his flesh, never having to ask where the hurt was, the two of them communicating on some sort of nonverbal, purely physical level.

From the sofa, Zerbe had watched this the way
he watched everything—for the vicarious thrill. K. C. Zerbe was Rush's younger half-brother—well, actually not his brother at all. Rush's mother had been the third trophy wife of Zerbe's father. That made them not related by blood. In Rush's opinion, that was the best kind of relation you could have.

It struck Zerbe as odd, as he had watched Gail rub every inch of Rush's body, that there wasn't a damn thing sexual about it for either of them. It was just physical therapy. Zerbe was sure he'd have had a happy ending before she stopped drizzling the oil on him. But then, Zerbe didn't get out much, as he was the first to admit.

While that, or something very much like it, was going on in a back room at the Nocturne after Rush's run-in with Tat and Rings, Zerbe was just playing with the picture Amelia had sent him on his cell phone. Since she hadn't told him her name, he hacked into the LAPD face-recognition program to see if she had a record. Despite what you see on TV, hacking into a secure server takes time and effort, but Zerbe had so much of the former that the latter went without saying. While the faces flashed by on the screen, trying to make a match with hers, he decided to reward himself by going into the kitchenette and making a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Who said he didn't lead a rich, full life?

They were out of bananas. By that time of night, Rush would be heading home. Zerbe figured he'd call
and ask him to pick some up on the way. He'd do the same for Rush, if he could. He'd pressed Rush's auto-dial on his cell phone before he remembered who he was calling.

“Hello.” It was Amelia. Zerbe had forgotten that she still had Rush's phone.

“Ah,” Zerbe said. “I was calling my brother.”

“Just a sec.”

Zerbe was puzzled. He heard her say, “It's for you.”

“Hello,” Rush said, the phone having been passed. “Can't talk right now, Zerbe. A girl's got a gun to the back of my head.”

That never happens to me, Zerbe thought.

Rush had left the club a little after one, strolling across the darkened parking lot toward his red 1966 Pontiac GTO convertible. John DeLorean's contribution to American culture. The ultimate muscle car.

He rolled his sore shoulder under the fresh T-shirt, thanked the Lord (whoever He was) that Gail was in his life, and remembered to scan the perimeter, making sure the Lamborghini was nowhere in sight. What he didn't notice was the tiny scratch on the GTO's passenger-side window frame, which would have told him that someone had taken a coat hanger to the door. Nobody's perfect.

He was on the 101 when his cell phone rang. He
reached down to his belt clip to answer it. It was empty. That's right, he had left the phone with—

“I got it,” said a voice coming from the back seat. He turned his head and was greeted with the barrel of a Beretta. Amelia was nestled back there, gun in one hand, cell phone in the other.

She answered the phone and then handed it to Rush, who told Zerbe that he couldn't talk right now on account of the gun to his head.

He pressed a button to end the call, flipped the phone shut, and tossed it into the passenger seat.

“That's one old-ass phone,” Amelia said.

“It works. That's all I ask from a phone.”

“It doesn't have any numbers memorized, or Facebook or anything. Don't you have any friends?”

“No, I'm an asshole.”

She frowned and shifted the gun to the other hand, bored, like it was a toy. “This is a big-ass car.”

“It's to compensate for my freakishly small dick. You know, that gun would have come in handy back at the club.”

“Yeah, I forgot it in my car.”

“Oh, so you have a car, too. Can I ask why you decided to hitch a ride with me?”

“They might know what my car looks like. They might follow me.”

“Who are they?”

“Them.”

“You knew this was my car?”

“I asked around. You've got quite a fan base at the club.”

“I don't let it go to my head.”

“I want to hire you to be my bodyguard.”

Rush pressed his foot on the accelerator. He weaved between the neighboring cars as the GTO ate up the road. “Well, I usually get work through referrals, but this is nice, this makes a change.”

The GTO was tearing along the freeway like a rocket.

“I'm Stanley Trask's daughter,” Amelia said.

Rush's face took on a stern expression. “My fee just doubled.”

The city lights were flying by. Amelia was getting scared. “Slow down.”

“No. This way, if you shoot me, you end up looking like one of those high school driver's-ed movies. Ain't no airbags in this baby.”

He reached with his hand to the back seat, palm open. She dropped the gun into it and sat back, sulking. “You're no fun.” But the car kept speeding along the 101. “So slow down!”

“We're being followed.”

She turned to look out the back window—the Lamborghini was a few car lengths behind them, bearing down. It was a duel between Italian and American engineering. Amelia was interested to see how it would turn out.

FIVE

T
o understand about Stanley Trask, you have to go back a few years to when things were simpler. To the time when Rush had a steady job and Zerbe was in prison. The good old days.

Tigon Security was run by Victoria Donleavy, an ex-cop with short-cropped gray hair that was almost the same color as her gray suit. She wore her blouse buttoned all the way up, no makeup, and flat orthopedic shoes, all in an attempt to tone down her earthy sexiness, which still flared up sometimes, especially when she got angry, which was fairly often. Her years with LAPD had taught her that women, if they were going to be taken seriously, had better not be attractive, threatening, or female. This dead-end had led her to an early retirement and a desire to beat law enforcement at its own game. Tigon was one of the best, most profitable private security companies on the west coast.

For her team, Donleavy recruited only the finest graduates of the military, the penal system, and the
L.A. street gangs. With Rush, she had a trifecta. Tigon's clients were the rich and the famous; if you had to ask how much they charged, you couldn't even afford a referral.

Stanley Trask didn't have to ask. He and his brother Walter ran GlobalInterLink, the Biggest Communications Company in the World. Their words, but true nonetheless. Cell phones, computers, e-readers, satellite TVs—it was well on its way to actually being the biggest company in the world.

Success breeds enemies. The Trasks had been receiving threatening letters, letters that Tigon Security (and Rush) had deemed credible. The Tigon Threat Assessment Team had made this claim after examining the letters using a variety of psychological and criminological criteria. Rush had made this claim after meeting Stanley Trask and deciding that he was a filthy rich, arrogant asshole who a whole lot of people probably wanted dead. The more Rush got to know Trask, the more sure he was that this initial assessment had been correct. Trask stole software from his competitors, stole money from his stockholders, and probably stole loose change from his left pocket when his right pocket wasn't looking. In other words, it was an honor to be protecting the guy.

But protecting him Rush was. Rush was a part of the Tigon team, and theirs was not to wonder why, theirs was but to shut up and follow orders. That was how, three years ago, he'd found himself in a van outside
the Marina, putting lotion on his nose, preparing for a shift in the blazing sun on the deck of Trask's yacht. He looked at his partner, Tony Guzman, ensconced comfortably behind monitors, earphones in place and Dr. Pepper in hand, and felt a twinge of resentment. The van was equipped with video, supplying views of the yacht, inside and out, as well as audio surveillance. It also had air conditioning and its own bathroom. It didn't seem fair.

“How come you get to sit in here and play with yourself and I have to go stand in the hot sun?” Rush asked.