Follow Her Home (29 page)

I heard him walk back to the car and slip into the driver's seat. He whistled as he pulled out of the spot. I didn't know where we were headed, but it was nowhere good.

*   *   *

I thought about the word
hard-boiled.
Marlowe was hard-boiled. Spade was hard-boiled. Was I? I felt fear deep in my chest like a living, yellow yolk, sloshing this way and that, bound and whole but runny and unbound. The yolk of a hard-boiled egg was just as real, but gray and solid. Maybe they were scared too, then, these heroes of mine, scared, but with their fear kept separate and suspended from everything else.

Unless of course the egg got cracked. Who knew what would happen then.

If I had any chance of escape, it would have to come from inside my car. Without moving my head, I took a brief survey of the front half, looking for a key to this locked-room riddle. My car was as I had left it. A twice-read copy of
Red Harvest
in the driver's-side-door compartment, four pairs of shoes in the passenger foot well. I turned to look in the backseat, casually, quickly. A summer sweater I wore the middle of last week, crumpled up to one side. Beside it was a black leather box with its lid removed, revealing a short stack of notes and letters, a scatter of dried rose petals. I hadn't seen it in years.

The car moved steadily as I watched the mist condense on the scratched screen of my tired mind, revealing loops and shapes, maps and plans. As far as the bastard Cook was concerned, I was making my exit at the end of this ride.

John hadn't broken into my apartment just to make my bed. He'd done a thorough search for my sources of human vulnerability, and he'd found the mementos from my time in love.

I leaned my head against the window and shut my eyes. For all his mental problems, John lacked imagination. The degenerate Hispanic shot in a drug deal; the sentimental woman a love suicide. It made me pretty mad. It made me feel hard-boiled.

We were driving down Third, with K-Town on the right. To the empty warehouse where he killed Diego.

John's gun was behind him, tucked between his back and the driver's seat. My seat. His left hand was on the wheel, his right on the stick. If I only had my hands, I'd be home free.

But I didn't have my hands. The cuffs chafed like teeth and I was losing sensation in my fingers. I knew it was possible to get out of handcuffs—if you had time, opportunity, keys, or bolt cutters. I had a moving car and an armed kidnapper. Any way you cut it, I was pretty well doomed, trussed up and ready for the oven.

I couldn't die without knowing the truth. It was a feeling I'd watched and read about often enough, this eleventh-hour greed, of rogue reporter, abandoned son, but the weight was real, clustered and thick. It swelled in my lungs and caught in my throat like smoke turned to plastic.

I tried to remember everything I could about Diego's last day. I saw him in the early afternoon. He went to lunch and hung out with his in-laws until he took off, sometime before nine. Right around then, he called me and I missed the call. No voice mail.

Jackie said they had been at the Grove. Walking distance from my apartment.

I remembered Diego's face as I told him about the man in my trunk and the man behind my steering wheel. It was worried and shocked—but it was something else, too, and as the newness of the news wore off, this was what remained.

Determination. And suddenly I had a hunch, and within seconds the hunch swelled inside me like a sponge in water. With a full turn of my head, I looked at John. I narrowed my eyes and stared with every seeing part of me at his profile. He was watching the road with a little too much interest. A tautness at his ear said he felt the pins of my gaze. I spoke slowly, words like water drops from a leaky faucet, small and gathered and heavy.

“Diego called me. When he was following you. It was the last time I heard his voice.”

I was staring at him so hard his head became small and blurred and half transparent, so that I had a full view out the window, of weird shapes in lifting darkness. A muscle twitched behind his ear, rustling the hair like an animal in brush—but that was all. I was drowning, and it was a straw.

“Look, I already know you killed Miller. Your lovely big brother went and told me. I'm willing to wager you've killed others, too. I'm in the palm of your hand right now. Will you just be kind and tell me what happened to Diego?” It was hard not to whine. I tried to keep steel in my voice and weed out the tin.

“You seem to ‘know' a lot, Miss Song.” I heard the quotation marks as sure as if they were written.

“I know he was tailing you just before he was shot. He told me so.”

“He told you he was following me and that he was about to get shot, do I have that right?”

I flushed. “It was late, and he was dead in the morning. Don't patronize me.”

“I would never. A regular old sleuth like you.”

“I told him about you. He followed you because he thought you were going to hurt me. You led him somewhere you could kill him. Why? Did you even know who he was?”

His lips parted just a centimeter and let out a short, dry laugh that was half nostril. His face softened, and when we hit a brief red light, he looked at me with eyes slimed over with pity. “I knew who he was. Diego Diaz. Twenty-five years old. Married. With a child on the way.”

I felt whiteness scar the backs of my eyes, dizzying and hot. He kept me locked in his unctuous gaze even when the light turned green. He smiled sweetly as he played with the stick and only looked forward again when I broke my wet eyes from his.

City twilight passed us outside, video without sound. I turned my head to my window, but as it came to rest on the glass I glanced back at my shoes in the foot well.

There were four pairs. Three black, one red, all with four- to five-inch heels. These were the shoes I could never drive in, that years of experience in L.A. taught me to leave in the car. They were all stilettos, beautiful and deadly.

I had a semblance of a plan. If it didn't work, I would be none the worse. If it did, I might die anyway. Given the circumstances, it was low-risk.

The seat adjusters in my Volvo were the old kind, with sudden locks on a slide rail. As far as I could tell, my seat was all the way up or close to it. The seat could fall back as much as a foot, maybe a foot and a half.

I would have to be quick. The whole thing couldn't take more than three or four seconds. The space between his arms and his gun was a gift, but not a generous one.

I slouched my head against the window and slumped deeper in the seat, bringing my wrists behind me to the right. I shook off my left flip-flop and chose the left red stiletto. It was a slingback pump with an open toe, and it boasted a platform and a five-inch heel that was just thicker than a knitting needle. I slipped into it and bobbed my heel up and down twice to secure the back strap. John watched the road.

I waited for my breath to even out. I counted silently to three.

I lunged backward and sideways and hooked my right foot under the metal bar of the seat adjuster. I yanked up on the bar as hard as I could and my seat rolled back and snapped into place. As it did I pulled my high-heeled foot out from the foot well, raised my leg as high as it would go, and slammed the pointed heel straight down into John's groin.

The lack of resistance felt sickening, like stepping in very thick mud.

He screamed. It was high-pitched and terrified, blood-dipped and metallic. It filled the space in the Volvo like Alice filled the rabbit's house. It was the worst sound I had ever heard.

A second later he was still screaming but his right hand left the stick shift to go for the gun. My foot raced his hand and shoved the steering wheel left, left, left. He tried for the wheel as he slammed the brakes, but he was in too much pain, and we were too close to the streetlight.

The crash came quick, and with it the sound and scrape of shattering glass. I kept my head down but the impact snapped me forward, where I met a deploying airbag. Parts of me stung, but they stung like parts of someone else.

My gamble had paid off and John had gotten the worst of it. I didn't know if he was dead, dying, or not even close, but his eyes were closed and his face striped with blood. I didn't want to find out.

 

Sixteen

I tossed off the shoe and unlocked the car with my toes. I pulled the driver's side handle and pushed the door open. I bent my knee to lower my foot behind John's back. My first two toes found the trigger guard of the gun. They worked like a crane to get a good grip, and when I had it raised in the air I chucked it outside. It didn't go far, but it was out of reach.

I pulled myself back up, all limbs on the passenger's side, and opened my door with my fingers, facing the inert villain as I negotiated the handle. I stepped onto the street. The sky was the color of miracles.

We had crashed on the corner of Fourth and Olive, en route to deeper downtown, where I was to plant a goodbye kiss to the world, following my one true love. It was a pretty idea.

I wobbled, but my legs were in walking condition. My right had fallen asleep despite all the excitement and the shivers went up and down as I made each step around the car.

The car was in bad shape. It had crumpled hard into the streetlight, and whatever force was opposite and equal to a car driven in no traffic had shot straight through the left headlight.

I walked around to the driver's side and found John slumped and unconscious, cheek to the steering wheel. Deep red stained a small circle in the crotch of his pants. The rest of him didn't look so good, either.

If he'd been planning to package my murder as a suicide, he had keys on his person. With a warm swallow of Los Angeles air, I approached his blood-let body to take inventory of his pockets. My chest heaved and pumped breath from my open mouth with a volume that surprised me. Now that I expected to live, this man terrified me even in his sleep.

“Juniper Song.”

I jumped inches off the ground at the sound of my name, and it took me a full second to register that it came from behind me.

When I turned around, I was staring into the driver's side of a black Mazda, where private investigator Charles Lindley sat gaping.

“Help, please.” I heard myself hyperventilating, my words long and bumpy. I had no idea why he was here, but I was relieved to see him.

He parked his car and bounded over. “What the hell?”

“I need you to search him and find the keys to these cuffs.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

I watched as he manhandled John's limp body, and in a minute he produced a slender silver key and freed my wrists.

I stumbled to John's gun and picked it up off the concrete. I had never held one before. It felt cool in my hand, and heavy, far heavier than I'd imagined.

Chaz gave me a worried look. “Do you know how to use that?”

“Hopefully I won't have to.”

I walked back to the car, wedging my way past Chaz to face the man who'd tried to kick my bucket. I kept the gun pointed at him with my finger on the trigger while I checked for a pulse. His throat was warm, with skin loose around the glands like an ill-fitting sock. It took me a few seconds to feel it, but he was alive. How alive was another story.

“Let's get out of here.” I shoved the gun into the waistband of my shorts, the grip against my navel and the business end resting against my thigh.

Chaz was already talking by the time we entered his car.

“I went to check on Hector's car again. If they knocked him off like you said, I thought I could find something at that body shop. Instead I found your Volvo and I thought, well, that's funny. So I stuck with it, and sure enough that man came by and picked it up, and he picked you up, and— Christ, you're lucky to be alive.”

I sat in Chaz's car in a daze, and his words barely reached me. I managed to say, “We have to go.”

“We'd better call an ambulance.”

“Do it driving.”

He didn't argue, and we slipped deeper into downtown while I curled up in the seat and hurt. The hurt was everywhere. My left leg was bloody and glass-bitten, and my back was going to punish me for weeks. The headache felt like it would never leave. I thought about all that had happened in the last few days, and I dared to ask myself if it was over. The murderer was behind me, fighting for his life. I had found my answers.

But I knew it wasn't over. Sleeping in his mansion and dreaming of a young girl in a short skirt was the real villain, the master behind the subservient puppet with a convenient criminal profile. I still held the information that got Greg Miller killed, and my status as his son's living best friend assured me no safety. And I wasn't the only one still in trouble. There was the girl.

In the eight years since Iris's death, I had never come to terms with what she did. I tried to avoid thinking about her, never talked to her in that needy, epistolary way we address the dead. I couldn't forgive her for choosing Quinn and tragic love over the rest of her life as my friend and sister. And in a private chamber of my thoughts, where the door swung open at the hint of invitation, I knew, with the immovable belief that backs up fact, that what had happened was entirely my fault. There was no one else who could have saved her, and with my best intentions I had let my only sister destroy herself for the sake of a wrongheaded love, while I watched.

At least Lori was not in love. But she was in Cook's power, and her mother would do nothing to keep her out of his reach. I had done nothing for her yet but take her away from that place and leave her where she could not stay. For her sake, I had to follow this thing through.

I thought about telling the police. Chaz had 911 on the phone, and all I had to do was scream murder to bring the law crashing down. It was about time I handed over my problems and let justice do the rest. Then I remembered who I was, and who Cook was, and how much I had in the way of direct evidence.