Dead to Me (19 page)

“You stupid little bitch.”

His fist swung down and cracked me across the face. The blow stung, but not as much as the crisp edge of Millie’s letter, which filleted the skin under my eye. My head spun and I fell to
my knees. Towering over me, Conrad drew back his hand and struck me again, this time catching me under the chin.

Splinters of light exploded in my eyes as my teeth clashed together, and I thought I could hear my father screaming something strangled and hoarse and very far away. My cheek felt slick with
blood, and when I spat, that was blood, too.

“If you thought that was going to work, you’re even dumber than your sister.”

He pulled a lighter out of his pocket, lit the corner of the envelope, and waved it under my nose. “So much for your letter.”

He dropped it to the ground and let it burn.

“Get up.”

I was about to pull myself up off the ground when I realized that listening to Conrad would probably get me another fist in the face. I spat another mouthful of blood, then hunched over on my
knees, pretending to retch into the dirt.

“I said get up.” Conrad’s voice was more agitated this time.

I stayed where I was on the ground but looked up to see Conrad circling me and jeering. I saw Rex and the man in the polka-dot suspenders watching, waiting to be told what to do next. And behind
them, I saw my father, who had taken advantage of the distraction to free his hands.

The driver was at least ten yards away, relieving himself in the dense scrub brush, and he must have taken the keys with him to do it because they weren’t in the ignition. In the midst of
it all, my father was hunched over, clawing furiously at the tape around his ankles.

If he managed to free himself and run back the way we came, they’d have to turn the car around to follow him. On a road this narrow, that would buy him at least a few seconds. It
wasn’t much time, but it might be enough for him to disappear into the woods, enough to have a fighting chance. Of course, it would give me one, too. If they wanted to follow both of us,
they’d have to split up. It was as good a plan as I could think up, and I suspected it was the best chance either of us was going to have.

Dad, I thought, this is more than you deserve.

The moment he broke through the last of the tape, I leaped to my feet and ran, my hands slapping uselessly against my back as I plunged toward the dark, empty road.

Conrad let out a bellow, and the other men sprang to attention. The driver scrambled back toward the car, zipping up as he ran. Then my father climbed out of the trunk, but he didn’t run
away like I’d expected.

Instead, he went for Rex’s gun.

I couldn’t be sure of what I saw out of the corner of my eye as I ran, it happened so fast. Behind me, I heard a shout and the sound of a struggle, then a gunshot.

I ran faster and didn’t look back.

I was a half a mile down the road when I heard the car, its tires crunching the shells and pebbles as it rolled slowly up the road. For an instant, I froze in the middle of the road, then dove
into the scrub brush that grew in thickets along the berm, wading in until I found a small clearing big enough to crouch in. I hoped there were no rattlesnakes here—the hills were full of
them. My whole face throbbed, and the cut under my eye burned, the blood on my cheek turning thick and sticky. I closed my eyes and waited for the car to pass.

The car slowed not ten yards from my hiding place, and a flashlight beam swung from one side of the road to the other. I burrowed down and hid my face in the scrub. It was too close, and
I’d missed my chance to crawl farther away from the road. Now I didn’t dare move, for fear I’d rustle the brush.

“Girl,” a voice whispered. “Come out if you’re back there. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Whoever it was, I didn’t believe him for a second. I didn’t even know if my father was still alive. For all I knew, Rex had gotten to the gun first. In fact, that seemed likelier. I
guessed that Rex had a lot more practice taking guns away from people than my father did.

The car door swung open, and I heard footsteps pacing up and down the side of the road. The flashlight beam shone down, illuminating patches perilously close to my hiding place.

Don’t move, don’t breathe, I thought.

The footsteps grew fainter, and I heard the squeak of the car door. A few seconds more and I would have been free to make my escape, to spend the rest of the night crawling down the snake- and
mountain lion-infested hills in the pitch dark. But instead, I sneezed. When I felt it coming, I smothered my mouth and nose in my lap. It hardly made a sound at all, but it was enough. The
flashlight beam froze, then swung back around, pointing right at the spot where I was. I lurched out of the brush and started to run, but the scrub was too thick, my legs half asleep, and I’d
barely taken two steps before a hand came down and caught me by the collar.

I twisted against his grasp and he let go, but not before he’d wrapped a thick arm around my waist the way that Conrad had. My body went rigid. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing
came out.

He spoke again, still in a whisper. “I’m here to help you. It’s okay.”

The man held me still, his arm wrapped around my waist, and he whispered it over and over again until I stopped shaking and my muscles went slack, and I finally found the courage to look back
over my shoulder to see that it was Conrad’s driver. He’d been quiet as we drove up the hill; he hadn’t spoken to any of the men in the car, hadn’t even looked at me.
I’d barely gotten a glimpse of his face, but saw now that it was heavily lined, with swollen purple bags under his eyes. His steel-gray hair was freshly barbered and parted to the side with
oil, but his mustache was full and bushy. He smelled faintly of peppermint.

Once I’d calmed down, he let go of me and cut the electrical tape around my wrists with a pocketknife. I shook them and gritted my teeth as the blood rushed painfully back into my
fingertips.

“Hurry,” he said. “There isn’t much time.”

I got into the backseat of the car, selecting the passenger side, out of arm’s reach. If anything happened, I could always open the back door and bail out. If the driver took offense at my
precautionary measures, he didn’t show it.

We drove through the hills in silence, tires kicking up gravel as we hurtled around the hairpin turns. Once we neared the edge of the park, he pulled over to the side of the road.

“Can you make it home from here?”

I nodded, hardly daring to believe what had just happened. I was only a few blocks away from Hollywood Boulevard now, and it felt like a million miles from that desolate road in Griffith
Park.

“I’ve got daughters of my own,” the driver said, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror. “I’ll tell Conrad I lost you in the woods.”

“There was a gunshot….” I said, trailing off.

The driver knew what I wanted to ask, even if I couldn’t bring myself to ask it.

“He went into the woods,” the driver said. “I don’t know if he was hit, but when I saw your father last, he was running.”

“Thank you.”

I wished I had better words for this man who’d risked so much for me.

“Go,” the driver said. “Get out of here, as fast as you can.”

The moment I was out of the backseat, the car made a U-turn and shot back up the road, kicking up a fog of dust and gravel, and then it was gone.

F
or a moment, the darkness and the nighttime noises closed in around me. I heard rustling in the brush, tree branches creaking in the wind, a
coyote’s howl. First I froze, and then I ran, my arms pumping, my feet slapping against the dirt road. The only human sounds I could hear were my own gasping breaths. I ran to the edge of the
park and didn’t stop until I saw the lights from Hollywood Boulevard shining in the distance.

It was late and the streets were quiet as I turned the corner and headed toward the Red Car stop. The only person I passed on my way was a bum wearing three-day stubble and pants that were shiny
with grease. He took one look at me and crossed to the other side of the street.

All I’d been able to think about was getting to safety. My face hurt—I knew that much—but I hadn’t even thought about how it must have looked. I found a store window and
inspected my reflection under the streetlight.

My left eye was almost swollen shut, and beneath it, an angry-looking cut oozed blood. My jaw was sore, the skin on my wrists raw. I tried to blot at the cut under my eye with the collar of my
shirt, but the blood was too sticky to wipe off without water. Now I had a gory eye
and
a blood-smeared shirt.

Sitting on the bench next to the streetcar stop, I saw a discarded section of the previous day’s
Los Angeles Times
. I sat down on the bench and unfolded it, trying to look like I
was deeply engrossed while I waited for the Red Car. The westbound cars went to my neighborhood, while the eastbound traveled to downtown, toward the County Hospital. I decided to get on whichever
one came first. Out in the open like that, every minute I waited passed like an eternity. I was sure that every passing car I heard was the Rolls-Royce, terrified that if I looked over the top of
my newspaper, I’d find Rex standing there.

When the westbound Red Car finally pulled up, I used the paper to shield my face, and took a seat in the back of the car. My breathing eased once I was on the move, and I willed my heart to stop
racing. I was going home. I needed to think about what I was going to do once I got there.

Conrad knew Annie was alive, he knew where she was, and he’d be coming for her. It wouldn’t matter how much I paid Eugene the orderly or how many night nurses were looking in on her,
or even if I was standing by her bed myself. Conrad had dropped me to the ground in a few seconds. I squeezed my eyes shut to hold back tears, and my swollen face throbbed with fresh pain.

My sister was in more danger than ever, and there was nothing I could do to protect her. Worst of all, I couldn’t think of anyone who could. Not the police, not Jerry Shaffer, not
Annie’s friends or our parents. Conrad was right. If he wanted to send someone through the doors of County Hospital to put a pillow over my sister’s face, it would be easy.

The Red Car made its way down Hollywood Boulevard, rattling my teeth together as it jiggled along the track. I felt empty. I was out of time, out of hope, and out of solutions.

Then a thought kindled and flickered in my brain.

It wouldn’t be easy, I thought. Not anymore.

Conrad Donahue was running out of time, too. He’d read Millie’s letter. Soon he’d be rushing over to Irma’s apartment to pry up the floorboards, looking for whatever
evidence was hidden there. But before he could do that, he and his cronies had to get out of Griffith Park, and before they could do that, they’d have to look for my father. And me.
They’d kidnapped and assaulted us, and we’d escaped. We were loose ends. Liabilities. The driver said my father had run into the woods after the gun went off. I hoped he’d gotten
a good head start before the other men set off after him. And Conrad didn’t know his driver had helped me. As far as he and his friends knew, I was still staggering around the woods with my
hands tied behind my back. Hopefully, they’d waste a little more of Conrad’s precious time looking for me there.

For the past few minutes, I’d been staring at the same two pages in the newspaper without seeing them. It was the entertainment section, I noticed now. Hedda
Hopper’s Hollywood gossip column, movie previews, and interviews with starlets. No matter where I went, I couldn’t seem to escape any of it.

And then, Conrad Donahue’s face jumped out at me halfway down the page. He was wearing a tuxedo in the picture, his arm wrapped around a pretty woman I recognized from a gangster movie
that had come out a few months before. Even in newsprint, his smile looked golden.

My eyes slid to a slight figure partly out of the frame, and I gasped. It was
her
, the girl from the picture in my father’s safe.

She had big, loopy curls and a china doll face, and she wore an airy, soft-hued dress that bared her shoulders. I’d guessed at it before, but now I was certain. This was Gabrielle.

She stood just past Conrad’s shoulder, smiling and holding a drink in her hand, just another pretty young face at a Hollywood party. I might have missed her had my eye not fallen first on
the man she was talking to—crisp, impeccably dressed, and as always, looking on while the famous people occupied the foreground.

My father.

The newspaper dropped from my hands, its pages scattering across my lap. I couldn’t stand to look at it anymore. The whole way from La Brea to Fairfax, I stared straight ahead, not caring
who saw my battered face.

When that picture was taken, Irma was alive, and a few hours later, she would be dead, and Gabrielle would be on the run, and my father would be home, sleeping soundly in his bed.

He’d been there. He’d talked to her, and either he hadn’t noticed she was just a kid, or he hadn’t cared. Couldn’t he tell she had no business being there?
Couldn’t he for once forget about all the celebrities he had to charm and put her in a cab home?