The Dirty Secrets Club (8 page)

got overextended, and lost big. His bread and butter at times in his life.

Nobody offered to join the game. Nobody wanted to talk to him. He moved the tiles around.

Doctor.
Yoshida was a proper name, so he didn't bother with that

Son. Overdose.

The satisfaction burned in his chest, like acid.

Boat.
He crossed another word with it, going down.
Maki.
Screw rules; he liked seeing their proper names.
Willets.
The A-list fashion queen was dead and so was his shrieking weed a boyfriend. Crankhead, skinny as a flower stem, sadistic as all fu
^c
k. Pouted like a lily but poisonous. Like all of them. But Perry had found a surefire weed killer.

^The
men who had walked past him sat down at a nearby table cups of coffee. It was noisy in here. He couldn't hear what they
^{ere s}
aying, but they were gawking at him. Fucks. They stared, hard

glares. Looking at his neck, and the scar. Nobody wanted to join a game with the freak.

For a second he considered setting them straight. But this place had a guard, a fat guy loitering near the door with his thumbs hooked on his belt. A real wannabe hard-ass lard-ass, dressed in a puke-green uniform. Where'd they get that color, some store that made clothes for officious dicks like priests and prison guards?

The coffee drinkers stared. Perry stared back. They looked away, like submissive dogs.

Fear. Good. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit jack shit.

He set out another name on the game board.
Harding.

It was a good start.

But he wasn't near the end, and time was short. He wanted answers by tomorrow. He had meetings downtown, and needed names by then.

He needed Skunk to get to work. He swept the tiles back into the box and stood up. He glanced at the coffee drinkers. He decided to set them straight after all.

He walked by their table. Pausing, he waited until they looked at him. He reached into his pocket. They went still. He took out his voice synthesizer and pressed it to his crushed larynx.

"Next time, we'll play Hangman. I never lose."

The intensive care unit at St. Francis Hospital was bright and hushed. The nurse at the desk, motherly in pink scrubs, was writing on a patient's chart when Jo came up the stairs. Jo was wearing a badge around her neck that identified her as a physician with staff privileges at the hospital.

"Angelika Meyer?" she said.

The nurse pointed over her shoulder. "Down the hall."

"How's she doing?"

"Serious but stable. Broken ribs, punctured lung, hairline skull fracture."

"Is she conscious?"

"Intermittently."

"Has anybody been by to see her?" Jo said.

"Just the police, and the attending kept them out of her room."

"May I see her chart?"

The nurse found it. Jo flipped through. Though Meyer's condition had stabilized, her situation was precarious. She could still slip into the abyss.

"We found a key ring in her purse," the nurse said. "It has her nickname on it. Geli."

She pronounced it the German way.
Gaily.

"Thanks." Taking the chart with her, Jo walked down the hall to Meyer's room.

Intensive care never changed. Day or night, it had an atmosphere of controlled crisis. The quiet, the vigilance, the monitors and watchfulness—ICU felt to Jo like the staging ground for a Special Forces mission.

ER was a different story. From her trauma rotation at UCSF she remembered the noise, the adrenaline, the way dog bites and flu could abruptly be replaced by drownings and gunshot wounds. ER was shock and awe. ICU was a stealth campaign. But people died here in greater proportion, because you didn't come to ICU unless you were in bad shape.

And Geli Meyer looked damned bad.

Jo paused in the doorway. Propped in the hospital bed, sprouting tubes, Meyer looked like one of the aliens in the research lab in
Independence
Day.
She had ECG suckers stuck to her chest and a central line IV inserted near her neck. A Foley catheter, a drain in her side, oxygen cannulas under her nose—she looked like a porcupine. Her skin was pallid gray, her blond hair ropy. Her eyes were closed.

Quietly Jo crossed to her side.

She put her fingers to the young woman's wrist. Her pulse felt strong and regular. She stroked Meyer's hand, hoping for a response, but the girl lay motionless. Her hand was cold. Jo pulled up the thermal blanket and tucked it comfortably around Meyer's legs.

What happened to you, girl? Why were you in the car with Callie Harding? What is it you want me to stop?

She walked over and opened the small closet. Meyer's shoes and skirt were inside. No shirt or bra. They must have been cut off in the ER. Meyer's purse sat on a shelf.

Jo glanced out the door. The nurse was on the phone.

Jo wasn't a cop. She had no search warrant, and rifling a patient's belongings was far beyond frowned upon. But she wasn't a thief, either, and Meyer wasn't talking. Maybe her possessions could talk in her stead. Jo glanced again at the nurse. She opened the bag and took everything out.

Pink lipstick, breath mints, lighter, grocery list. No cell phone. She opened the wallet, found a driver's license, two credit cards, eighty dollars in cash.

One photo, a snapshot of a man who had a Kansas farmer's weather-beaten face and a smile so cool, he looked like he was auditioning for
Reservoir Dogs.
His thumbs were hooked over a belt with a gigantic silver buckle, rodeo size, shaped like a casino chip. Tarantino Gothic.

Older brother? Boyfriend? No name or date, no way to contact him. Dead end.

She put everything back.

She picked up Meyer's black skirt, reached in the pocket and felt a slick piece of paper. It was an album sleeve from a CD. The All-American Rejects,
Move Along.
It contained the lyrics to the songs on the album. One song had been circled in black pen.

Jo blinked, and her breath snagged.

"Dirty Little Secret."

She knew the song, could hear it in her head, the playground taunt of the melody and the singer's teasing, conspiratorial tone. The final line of the chorus had been highlighted with bright yellow marker:
Who has to know?

A note was scrawled across the page in black ink.
Callie, this is what you were talking about, isn't it?

And below that:
Can anybody play?

With a smiley face drawn next to it.

Jo compared the handwriting to that on the grocery list. They matched. She returned to the bedside. Meyer lay still and silent.

"Geli, I want to help you. I wish you could help me."

She might as well have been talking to the sky. After a minute she returned Meyer's chart to the nurses' station. She asked for a sealable plastic bag, an adhesive label, and a black Sharpie. Putting on her toughest I'm-a-doc face, she held up the Ail-American Rejects album sleeve for the nurse to see.

"This is evidence relating to the crash." She put it in the plastic bag.

The nurse scowled. "Where did you get that?"

"It needs to go to the police." She sealed the bag, stuck the label across the seal, signed and dated the label. She handed the Sharpie to the nurse. "You need to sign it as well. You're my witness that I've created a chain of custody."

The woman looked dubious.

"Please," Jo said.

Grudgingly, the nurse signed.

"Thanks." Jo put the plastic bag in her satchel. It was an ad-hoc solution, but it would have to do. "Page me if Meyer regains consciousness."

The nurse's look said that nobody expected that to happen soon.

Skunk honked the horn. Traffic on California was spastic. Loud, shiny, jerking along, slowing and pumping like blood through a clogged artery—idiots, crowding him. The sun felt like a deliberate poke in his eyes.

The Cadillac cruised east. Skunk drove with the window down, one elbow propped on the sill, right hand hanging on the top of the wheel. He felt more than saw heads turn as he motored along.

This was the way the prosecutor had run. Along California Street, blasting across the flats, blowing that big-ass BMW engine wide open over the hills, until she turned and drove into the bridge railing and died. He clenched his jaw. She was dead, absolutely stone-stiff, ain't-coming-back-from-it dead. And that was good. That was a kitty treat. But he couldn't shake his nerves, this worry that felt like an itch under his skin, and that fucking sun was really annoying him, glaring off the hood of the car and the dashboard and the cherry-red leather of the big bench seat. Sports talk buzzed at him. He sank lower behind the wheel and turned up the radio. When he stopped at a red light, people in the crosswalk stared the car up and down.

The Caddy was a 1959 Eldorado, pimped out, and people gawked at it like it was a naked stripper idling in the middle of the street. It was cream-colored, with gleaming flanks that ran long and smooth all the way back to a pair of sharp fins. Real space-age, stab-your-eye-out chrome fins, which were punctuated with a pair of jet-nozzle taillights, in titty-red. This was the ultimate car, the biggest, baddest bitch on the road, power and sex on wheels, the Pamela Anderson of vehicles.

He loved it. When he sat behind the wheel, he
became
the car, because everybody in the city looked, and not one of them ever saw him.

Cross-traffic spattered past. The radio was moaning about the 49ers and their blowout loss to Chicago. Bad coaching, injured linemen, and the quarterback had thrown three interceptions.

"Pussy," Skunk said.

He'd lost money on the game. The team stank, couldn't even beat a ten-point spread. The only guy putting it out there was the 'Niners' wide receiver, and Skunk didn't like the talk jocks praising this pretty college boy white kid who grew up in luxury and got a business degree, even if he had hauled down four touchdown passes in the past two weeks.

"Rich pussy." He leaned toward the radio. "Scott Southern is a p-U-S-S-Y."

Skunk was himself a white guy who hadn't grown up in luxury, hadn't gone to college, wouldn't be opening a string of sports-themed restaurants on the back of his luck and fame when he retired from the game in a few years. Skunk had been cheated. Cheated out of height
and
looks, cheated out of charm and the velvet tongue that lubricated
a
path through the world for people like Scott Southern.

Skunk believed in resentment.

Resentment was a mighty engine, a force that drove him to make things right. When the world cheats you, then getting back at the people who got the portion you deserve—that's just evening out the scales. Some folks called it sour grapes. But he loved sour things, and feasting on resentment was the sourest of all, and very, very satisfying.

The prosecutor's death was unsatisfying. Because of the passenger.

She was still alive. Three dead, the news was reporting this morning. That meant Harding plus the two crushed people in the front seat of the airport shuttle van. He'd seen them haul Harding's passenger from the wreck and put her in the ambulance. He'd been sure she was a goner, and then that dark-haired woman came running like a banshee and jumped on the wreck and hollered for the paramedics. They got Angelika Meyer out of the BMW and drove off like a house on fire.

He'd seen it from the parking garage on Stockton Street, the one overlooking the tunnel. It made his guts tighten. Because Perry was going to be furious.
At him.

Pray, he thought. Pray, you got what you wanted. Harding, dead.

But Perry had been specific about what else he wanted: Get the
ⁿ
ames of the leaders of the group from Harding. And don't blow
^lt:
- But the whole thing had gone butt-ass wrong. Harding shouldn't have taken a passenger.
She
had
screwed
things up. Skunk was
going
to
get
the
blame,
but Harding was the one who
blew
it. And
Angelika
Meyer was the result. She
'd
become a leftover, like a trail
of grease
spilled on the road. Dangerous if left there, and dirty, and liable
to
make further mess. Grease spots
were
what made things spin out
of control.

The light turned green. Slowly he pulled out, the Caddy crossing the intersection regally, like a great white shark. The radio kept whining at him.

Pussies. Cheaters.

Things needed cleaning up. That meant it was going to get dirty again.

8

J
o drove down 101 toward Palo Alto feeling pensive. Her truck

was a blue Toyota Tacoma, dinged up but so rugged that it would probably still be running after she herself was buried and part of the fossil record. It had been Daniel's, which is why she'd never gotten around to hammering out the dents and scratches along the side. He'd put them there on their last climbing trip to Yosemite, driving stupid the night they camped in Tuolumne Meadows. He threatened to tell people she'd done it mauling him in a fit of passion.
You're a wild woman,
he said.
A crazy thing.
Then he laughed.