Start Shooting (38 page)

“I don’t care. Help me find Ruben before he can continue and I’ll forgive you anything. So will Chicago, the feds, and anyone with sense.”

Arleen stares at our shoes. “Friday, I was delivering a message for Ruben on Lawrence Avenue. It was part of the lie Ruben tricked me into. Robbie Steffen drove up and shot a man to death. That makes me an accessory to murder and a witness Robbie Steffen can’t leave alive.”

Unfortunately, she’s right. The ASA will roll her to testify against Robbie. If she can prove Ruben tricked her, the ASA will promise to cut her loose after the trial. But Robbie won’t.

“Ruben said he could square me with Robbie. I believed Ruben and went to Greektown yesterday. But it was setup to get Robbie and me killed, to pacify the Koreans.” Arleen stands. I pull her back. She squeezes her temples. “I might’ve shot one of the Koreans.”

“You? Do they know it was you?”

“The Korean shot Robbie, then tried to kill me. I think I shot him. Twice.”

I grab her hands. They’re trembling. “Self-defense—have to convince the ASA you weren’t a willing participant, then testify against Ruben and Robbie. Not easy, but with right pub and a good lawyer you could walk.”

“Maybe, but I won’t walk from Toddy Pete. He won’t let me put his son in prison. Forever.”

I point at the crowds heading south to the concert. “Toddy Pete won’t let Robbie torch the Olympic rebid, either. Way too much at stake.” I squeeze her hands. “Arleen, look at me. Do the Koreans know it was you in the alley?”

“I don’t think so, not yet. But I’m dead if Ruben tells them. And he will if I don’t finish with Furukawa.”

She tries to stand again and I hold her down.

“Bobby, all … all I want is the Shubert; even if I can’t have it. I want to win
once
, for Coleen and me. Just once.”

“And you can; we can spin this. I know we can; a hero actress who goes undercover and saves a city. The
Herald
will front-page it.”

Arleen starts a smile that she stops. “Robbie and the Koreans won’t let me—”

“I carried your picture for twelve years. I only stopped because it was wearing out.” I squeeze her hands again. “No one hurts you while I’m alive. Not the Koreans, not Robbie. No one.”

I concentrate on Bobby’s brown eyes; not a spec of bad in them, just boyish promise surrounded by a man’s resolve. He means to save us. Who knows if he can, but he means to, and right now that’s our happily ever after. I lean forward and kiss him on the lips. And that feels like happily ever after for real.

I dig out my phone and hit Redial on Ruben’s number, dry swallow, then hold the phone so Bobby can hear.

Ruben answers. “
Niña
, a homeless man? Beautiful, I gotta say. Threw a strike.”

Bobby winces at the voice. I shrug,
sorry
, and say, “I’m out, Ruben, leave me alone.”

“Almost. Just one more errand and you can have your Shubert role. Everyone gets paid, all is forgiven.”

“Can’t. Have to be at the Shubert at eight o’clock—”

“Yeah, I talked to Sarah. No problem. We’ll be all done by then.”

“Leave Sarah alone. I mean it. And stay away from the Shubert. I’m out, Ruben. Over. Done.”

“
Niña
, don’t go stupid on me now, not this close to the finish. Santa Monica and Lawrence Avenue just a phone call away.”

Bobby taps my knee and mouths
Santa Monica
?

I stammer, losing my place.

“We don’t want that pier in Santa Monica coming back, ruining everything.”

Chicago fades to Santa Monica, the vengeful nightmare apparition
cornering me on the pier. Lightning behind me; nowhere to run; years of little-girl horror packaged into one final assault. I scream: “Get away from me!” An arm grabs my shoulder. A phone yells in my ear. I blink back to Chicago, to crowds, faces staring, to heat searing my skin and Ruben’s voice in my ear. Bobby squeezes me to him. I tell the phone, “Money. I want part of the money.”

Silence.

I hang up, embarrassed, flushed at all memories, thoughts of … Bobby stares deep in my eyes. Looking for the pier? The man on it? Bobby touches the heat in my face.

“I don’t want a dime; don’t know why I said that. I want the Shubert, then I want this to end.”

“Me, too.” Bobby half smiles, cracked and friendly, but crushed by his gangster-monster brother. “When Ruben calls back, fight for money—be an actress, play it like a part—but agree to whatever will put you and him together.”

My phone rings.

Bobby finishes with “And I’ll take it from there.”

I answer the phone. Ruben says, “So,
chica
, we in business now? How much you think you need to outrun Santa Monica?”

I channel Lilly Dillon in
The Grifters
. “Threaten me one more time, Ruben, and I’m calling the U.S. attorney.”

Silence. Then: “Why? How much of my money do you want?”

Bobby mouths,
Five million
.

My eyes go wide. Bobby nods. I say, “Five million.”

“Don’t think so,
chica
.”

“Then you and your partners get another front man. Or face the Japanese yourself.”

“The Japs runnin’ scared right now; little jumpy after that vial hit their man. But they’re good with you. We’ll give you a hundred K—fuck it, two-fifty, cash—”

“Make it two million or I hang up and call Toddy Pete, tell him you’re behind his only son being shot, and you’re the maniac screwing up the biggest move of T.P.’s career.”

“No Shubert for you.”

“
Like you’ll let me have it?
You’re a bottomless pit, Ruben. Pay me and
I disappear. Or in the next ten minutes I bury you with Toddy Pete. Period. End of offer.” I hang up, quit playing Lilly Dillon, and semi-fall back into Bobby’s shoulder.

Bobby’s gone pale listening to his brother, but builds me a smile. “That was good. Ruben will believe you want the money.”

“I want the Shubert. Ruben’s not taking the Shubert unless he kills me.”

Bobby grips my arm. “I love Ruben, but Ruben’s going to prison. I’ll make peace with that before we see him. And I’ll make him kill me before he hurts you.” Bobby swallows and pats my arm. “He won’t do that. I’m his brother; he won’t hurt me.”

I stare, don’t tell Bobby that I think Ruben is a sociopath who wouldn’t think twice about killing his little brother and eating him.

“What about Agent Hahn?”

“She’s a problem. A wild card. But she has to be part of the solution … to be sure Furukawa’s … mess is cleaned up.”

I scan the crowd on Water Street. “Do we trust her?”

“No. Tania Hahn’s a private contractor, a bounty hunter with CIA credentials. She and her folks are who were packaging me as a child molester.”

I pull away, not sure I heard that.

Bobby says, “So she could leverage me. To get to Ruben and Robbie and my sergeant.”

“We’re betting our lives on someone who’d do that?”

Bobby nods. “Hahn has resources.”

“So does the devil, but we wouldn’t trust—”

“I can’t let her kill Ruben, I don’t care what he’s done. And I think she suspects Ruben gave up the Toyota that killed her girlfriend.”

I lean farther away and Bobby pulls me back.

“It’s complicated, I know, but I think you and I can collapse the whole thing in on all of them.” Bobby makes a test tube with his fingers. “Provided the bomb hasn’t already gone off.”

“The vial I—It was symbolic. Something Dr. Ota would know.”

“Hope so.” Bobby eases back to explain. “There are thirty vials like the sample you gave the Japanese. Hahn calls them the ‘Hokkaido package.’ By the end of World War II, Dr. Ota and his fellow scientists
had created what they hoped was the equivalent of America’s atom bomb—a live virus, a form of the plague that helped them kill thirty million Chinese.”

“That’s what Ruben’s selling?”

Bobby nods. “If his partner hasn’t changed her mind.”

“Oh. My. God.”

My reflection in the coffee-shop window looks scared and off-balance—like me, not Lilly Dillon from
The Grifters
. I’m waiting for Ruben Vargas, a sociopath willing to unleash live-virus plague in Chicago.

A man I’m going to help. My phone rings next to my coffee.

Be Lilly Dillon. Be The Grifters
. I inhale into a tough, streetwise character who spent much of her life outside the law, then tell my phone and Ruben Vargas: “ ‘Reckless’ would be a compliment—”

“We have to talk right now,” says Tracy Moens, “about your father. Before tomorrow’s depositions.”

“Bye.”

“I know your father raped you. And Coleen … for years. Something happened that February night that was impossibly worse and your sister ran. You couldn’t get away or didn’t try, but Coleen did.”

Moens keeps talking. My eyes squeeze shut—the
go-away
defense Coleen and I used. Before, during, and after—it didn’t happen. She’d promise me; I’d promise her back—bad dreams, only bad dreams, hold each other under the shower till the bad dreams were gone.

“Your father lied to the police and the prosecutors during all three trials; stood by while one black teenager was imprisoned for life and Anton Dupree was executed. Your father knew
he
was the rapist, not Dupree. That’s the same as murder.” Pause. “Your mother knew. And you knew. But no one talked.”

Coleen and I talked every night. She didn’t stop screaming for years.

“That year you watched the echoes of that night slowly kill your mother, then ran away hoping to keep them from killing you. Nineteen years later a ‘blond woman’ shot and wounded your father on a pier in Santa Monica, and then let him drown … four days before you arrived in New York.”

I hang up on Moens, drop the phone, and both hands wipe at my father on my skin. The air fouls with the taste of the Four Corners—the stockyards slaughter, and—

Ruben slides into my booth.

His hands and knees are inches from mine. Ruben looks at my hands, then me. His brown eyes are empty, chilling; my father’s eyes. “One hour, you make the trade.”

My phone rings again. Ruben barks, “Don’t answer.”

I force my father away. Lilly Dillon bites my jaw tight and stares at Ruben across the table.
I’m going to the Shubert, motherfucker. You’re going to prison
.

Ruben’s skin has blackened under the bandage that crosses his left eyebrow. His lower lip looks as swollen as three hours ago when he dropped me on South Michigan. With my empty vial of live-virus plague. That we hope was empty.

Ruben’s clean jacket and shirt suggest he’s been home, probably had a shower. Calm and cool, like a serial killer with a whole night ahead of him. Like killing your partners, robbing the Korean mafia, and risking mass murder for money is Lesson One in the sociopath manual.

He says, “My little brother and you find some time?”

Lilly Dillon: “Been kinda busy running your errands.”

Ruben’s coffee arrives. “Met his girlfriend yet, Tania Hahn?”

I don’t blink or look away, or do anything Lilly Dillon wouldn’t. “She your other partner? Robbie’s mystery Vietcong bitch?”

Ruben smiles at another default admission I was in the alley, but he’s focused on any tells, any hint that I intend to harm him or betray his plans. “In thirty minutes, you’ll deliver a box to the Jap women who were at the Maxwell Market. That simple. We get a taste of the money, they get half their vials. Let the Japs inspect your box. They’ll give you a bag that weighs twenty-two pounds. The bag and you drive back to me.”

Lilly Dillon sips her coffee, wary but confident.

Ruben keeps watching me for tells. “Round one will be simple—half don’t help ’em; they gotta recover one hundred percent of the package or Furukawa and Ota are front-page.” Ruben stares. “Round two could be tougher.”

Lilly Dillon: “My two million’s paid out of the first trade or no deal.”

Ruben leans his sociopath, serial-killer smile closer to me. “Or you’re gonna call Toddy Pete and the U.S. attorney? From here? While I sit back and watch?”

I don’t move or blink, because Lilly Dillon wouldn’t. “I have a friend. My friend has a script and two phone numbers.”

Ruben nods, then lays his oily hand on top of my coffee cup. Where my mouth was. His nails are long and perfect and way too close to me. “
Niña
, the Japs are only payin’ one million up front, just a taste. We wanted more, thought we could get it, but old Dr. Ota’s too smart for that. You get your money after round two. And save the lie that you don’t care about the Shubert, okay? If that’s the truth, then take a walk, make your next two million waitin’ tables in a Koreatown basement.”

Lilly Dillon adds up her limited options, demonstrating resolve not fear, then grabs her purse. “The very first lie I smell in the fifty lies you plan to tell me, I blow this up
for everyone
.”

“Don’t need to hurt or rob you to get what I want.”

Lilly stares. “Then let’s go do it.”

Ruben doesn’t move. He peers out the window. “Your
friend
out there?”