Killing Ruby Rose (15 page)

CHAPTER 16

The Pier was crowded for a Friday afternoon in late October. Unseasonably warm weather and the Halloween spirit buzzed in the air.

As I people watched, ghouls and phantoms roamed the beach. Some dude wearing nothing but skate shoes, board shorts, and a Captain Jack Sparrow wig played Bob Marley tunes on his guitar below me. Another kid, wearing one of those white masks from the movie
Scream
, casually rode his beach cruiser down the boardwalk. The souvenir shop in the middle of the Pier even had a huge grim reaper–shaped kite flapping around in the breeze.

The real ghost—schmucky Sammy—could be anywhere, watching me, taking aim to shoot me from afar. He had a camera lens for all occasions. Sammy had said to come alone, so I made sure I scheduled our little rendezvous for when Liam had a football game an hour away and would be gone all afternoon and night.

Liam and I had been together every other possible minute of the day for two weeks. I tried to act like it wasn’t necessary, but he stuck by my side—which may or may not have had something to do with all the kissing. It seemed like whenever we had the chance, we’d lose ourselves in each other: at the beach, in my room, at the back of the library.

Shaking the images from my mind, I looked down on the beach for distraction. And what do you know—Jell-O-Shot Taylor and her still nameless sidekick lay tanning in their matching hot-pink string bikinis. I felt a larger than usual amount of spite rise up within me. Not only had Taylor most likely taken the upper hand in the valedictorian race, but she was embracing the seemingly carefree life that I’d never have again. She had a friend to hang out with, time to lie in the sun, and a future full of normalcy. If ending up incredibly successful and somewhat famous on the
Real Housewives of Orange County
is “normal.” Better than ending up on
Cops
, though.

Taylor said something, and her friend’s high-pitched laugh floated on the breeze all the way over to slap me in the face. Alana and I used to be like that—happy, silly, naive. I had no idea what she thought happened that night, or what she’d remembered since, but as far as I knew, she hadn’t told a soul about being drugged, bound, and left for dead on a cliff.

I’d tried to call her. I texted her about twenty-five thousand times, with gentle questions like, “What’s up?” or “Wanna hang?” or “Need chocolate?” I told myself she just needed more time. She’d been mad at me before and had gotten over it. After all, we were besties. It said so on the chain necklaces we got in junior high.

“Well, well, well, if it’s not the infamous Ruby Rose.” A thick and greasy voice sludged down my ear. Was he talking with his mouth full of food?

I turned to find an equally repulsive visual. Oily face, shiny bald head, and the unshaven jowls of a chipmunk about to hibernate. He took the last bite of the burrito in his hand and threw the yellow wrapper toward the garbage can about ten feet away. He missed.

I looked down at him in disgust—I mean I literally looked down at him because he was so short.

“Thanks for coming,” I said, swallowing some pride.

“I brought what you asked for,” he said, swallowing down the food and opening his jacket to expose a flat manila envelope tucked into his pants. What did he think this was, some kind of drug deal? The thought of touching that envelope made me want to take a shower in hand sanitizer.

“Can I see them?” I wished he’d just hand them to me.

“Let’s discuss the terms of this deal first.”

“What’s to discuss? You said you’d help me.”

“For a price.” He stared at me like I was an idiot. “You didn’t think this was free, did you?”

“Fine, how much dirty money do you want?” I stared back like
he
was clearly the idiot.

“I’m not talking money.” He looked at all the girls in bikinis and licked his lips.

“If you think I’m gonna…” I trailed off, incapable of even forming words so vile.

“Relax, that’s not what I meant.” He patted his camera. “I meant some exclusives. I get some pictures of you doing
interesting
things, and you get pictures of a black van doing
uninteresting
things. By the way, do you think this black van has something to do with you blowing LeMarq’s brains out?”

“What do you mean
interesting
?” I said through clenched teeth.

“You know—you in a bikini doing Tai Chi, you scantily clad in the arms of your hot new boyfriend,” he said through a smile so big the pigeons were likely to crap on it. Then he dropped the smile. “Or a tip the next time a shooting goes down.”

I hadn’t given this snake enough credit. He saw a pattern and knew it would happen again. Maybe he knew it already had.

I nodded reluctantly. “We can work something out,” I said, careful not to agree to anything specific.

He handed me the sweaty envelope, and I quickly took it.

“I knew your dad, you know.” He took off his sunglasses and cleaned them with his dirty shirt. “Long time ago. He was a good guy.”

“How would
you
know
him
?” I asked, seriously confused by how this lowlife could know a legend like my dad.

“He helped me out on a research paper I did in grad school. This was a few years back, before he became Sergeant, before I
…
got into this.” He put his glasses back over his squinting eyes, like he was suddenly ashamed of himself. “I used to be a real journalist.”

“That’s hard to believe,” I muttered. “So why’d you join the dark side?”

“Money,” he said flatly. “Grad school ain’t cheap.”

And apparently, it’s ineffective at teaching proper grammar
. “What did my dad help you with?” I asked.

“Rooting out some
interesting
cops,” he said with raised eyebrows, like I was supposed to know what that meant.

“OK,” I said, raising my eyebrows in return.

“He made a few enemies back then, but I wasn’t one of them. He scratched my back and I scratched his.” He made another incomprehensible facial gesture. He thought we were speaking in some kind of code and I knew the subtext. But I didn’t.

“They won’t tell me anything,” I burst out, knowing I was changing the subject. “They say my dad died in an ambush, blown up by explosives. But they have no idea who or why. Do you have any more back-scratching buddies left in SWAT?”

He dropped all the wise-guy pretenses. “Sure I do.”

“Anybody say anything about what happened?”

“Sure, sure,” he said. “I still got some buddies in SWAT who talk. Loyal guys. Guys still torn up about it. Yeah, word is someone was causing him problems. A high-ranking special operative—someone with a vendetta. There was a report, an official complaint your dad filed just weeks before…” He stopped to make the sound of a bomb exploding and illustrated it with his fat little hands. “They didn’t tell you this stuff? Not even Mathews, your dad’s replacement? I thought the two of you were close.”

“A report?” I said in half disbelief, half rage. “No one ever mentioned a report! Certainly not Mathews. What did it say?” Could the “special operative” be Mr. D. S.?

“I’m not sure. I never saw it. This is just what I heard from Mathews, off the record. I’m not supposed to…” Uneasy, he started to look around. Like he felt someone watching us. “Look, that’s really all I know.”

“Can you find out? Could you ask Mathews again?” I knew I sounded desperate, but I didn’t care.

“That’s all I got,” he said, nonchalantly running his tongue around the inside of his mouth as if he was checking for lucky leftovers. I had to force myself not to gag.

“I don’t want to talk to you any more than you want to talk to me, but please, if you find out anything else, will you let me know?”

Either I’d said something that amused him or he found some beef jerky stuck in an incisor, because his goofy grin made him look far too satisfied.

“I’ll tell you one thing, sweetheart,” he said, backing away. “Talk to Detective Martinez. He knows more than you think he does. Waaaaaayyy more.”

Sweetheart? Martinez? This loser knew just how to piss me off.

“Why him?” I started to follow the trail of slime, but he held up his hands like
I’ll touch you with these greasy things if I have to
.

“Remember that corrupt-cop thing your dad and I were working on all those years ago?”

“You can’t mean Martinez? If that was true, he wouldn’t have been promoted to Detective.”

“Let’s just say that Martinez was good at getting in and out of more than just your mom’s panties.” He dropped his chins and grinned. A quick palm thrust would wipe that smug look off his face. “Not long after your dad found out about the affair, he turned Martinez in to Internal Affairs for some ‘misplaced drug evidence.’ Nothing stuck of course. Jack made the move to SWAT, and Martinez made his way up the ladder all the same. That’s the thing about corruption, it’s hard to know how deep it goes. But make no mistake, Martinez’s hands weren’t clean.”

“But my dad couldn’t prove it?” It was more a statement than a question.

“The thing is, Jack and Martinez were both damn good at their jobs. In some ways, they were a lot alike. Both highly trained, ambitious Marine brothers until the end of time and all that jazz. They were tight. But the
way
they did things couldn’t have been more different. While Jack was all
letter of the law
, Martinez was all
spirit of the law
. Martinez bent the rules, did things his own way, and Jack didn’t like it. Jack thought he could change Martinez. That as his partner, it was his duty or some shit
…
pardon my French. But obviously, that didn’t happen.

“While Jack made his way up to Sergeant fairly quickly, Martinez built a reputation as a dirty cop. About a year ago, your pops
allegedly
began suspecting Martinez of suspicious dealings with a few drug rings.” Sammy paused to make a full-circle motion with his chubby hands, then said, “So, when I heard Martinez’s name came up in the personal complaint Jack filed the month before his death, I couldn’t help but wonder—”

“Wait,” I said. “My dad filed a report against Martinez one month before he died?” I couldn’t believe the vast amount of information I didn’t know. It kept falling on top of me like an avalanche.

“No, the report wasn’t filed against Martinez. Remember, I said the complaint was against someone else—someone from both of their pasts. Somebody I don’t know about, unfortunately. But Martinez was a
witness
to threats against Jack. Apparently it would’ve taken a lot more than a nearly wrecked marriage and an almost-destroyed career to break the Marine bond they shared. Water under the bridge.” Sammy stared with skeptical eyes at the water slamming against the Pier’s beams.

I shook my head in astonishment. Was he insinuating that Martinez didn’t hate my dad anymore? That they made up, and he was actually helping my dad, trying to protect him from someone—maybe the same someone who’d been setting me up? Could I believe this dirty little slop of a man? Had I misinterpreted Martinez’s concern all this time? Was he trying to protect me against the same man who murdered my father?

“Look, kid…” Sammy paused and glanced around nervously. “I gotta go, but don’t forget to call. Remember, I scratch your back, you scratch mine.”

The only thing I wanted to scratch was my skin in case some of his head lice had jumped onto my body.

But he really did know my dad—and in a way I never had.

I was supposed to go see Dr. T at 3:00. First, she pushed the appointment back, which I thought was lucky since that was the time Sammy had wanted to meet. But while I was on my way over to her office, she canceled altogether, saying she wasn’t feeling well. That had happened like two times ever. Snow at the beach was more common. I wondered if I’d told her too much. If she was distancing herself from me because of what she knew I’d done.

I would’ve considered it another stroke of luck that the house was empty when I got back, but who was I kidding? My mother was never home.

I pulled the pictures out of the envelope and thought about burning it in the trash can to make sure all Sammy’s slime was gone. But that would raise flags I didn’t need, so I put it in the kitchen trash compactor and washed my hands four times. Just to be sure.

He had four pictures of the van. Clear, digitally enhanced photos. I pulled open my dad’s database again and plugged in the plate number.

One name popped up: D. Silver. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. D. S. now had a last name
and
an address: 4081 Royal Hill Bay, Newport Beach, California—only twenty minutes from here.

Now I wished Liam wasn’t away at his game. I shouldn’t go—no, I couldn’t go—to Newport without him. And yet it would be virtually impossible for me to sit here alone and twiddle my thumbs all night. Surely doing a simple drive-by would be a safe enough activity in my Mary Poppins–equipped Big Black. We could just go check out the address.

I closed out my dad’s computer and headed over to his gun safe, putting in the pathetically simple code—911. The safe door creaked open, and I stared at the racks of weapons like a kid at a candy store. Since my handgun, Smith, had gone into the LeMarq evidence logs, never to be returned, I wanted something similar. Hanging on its hook was my dad’s nickel-plated Glock, but I could barely stand to look at it, let alone touch it. Maybe I shouldn’t be taking a gun at all.

I’d been somewhat successful at blocking out most of what happened that night at the warehouse. Liam and I had an unspoken agreement not to talk about it. But now, as I stared at the Glock, I couldn’t help feeling the darkness of those deaths creep over me again. Why had Silver returned my dad’s gun to me?

The only reasonable choice seemed like my mom’s Ruger pocket revolver. It was tiny enough to seem like middle ground between a real gun and nothing at all. The only reason we even had it was because my mom once told my dad she wanted a gun small enough to fit in her small Coach purse, and he bought it for her anniversary present. She got so mad that he’d dared offer it in the place of a “real anniversary gift” that she never picked it up. I couldn’t tell if it had ever been used. I knew my dad wouldn’t have been caught dead with a little thing like this.