Trace (13 page)

    
She touches the left paddle and drops to second gear. Now she is going five miles below the speed limit, and the driver stays behind her. He doesn't seem interested in passing her.

    
"Okay, let the games begin," she says. "You're fucking with the wrong chicken, asshole." She suddenly turns a hard right into a strip mall parking lot.

    
"Oh shit. What the hell. . . ? Now he knows you're messing with him," Rudy says in annoyance.

    
"Get the plate now. You should be able to see it."

    
Rudy twists around in the seat, but he's not going to get the plate because the Ford LTD has turned off too, and is still on their tail, following them through the parking lot.

    
"Stop," Rudy says to Lucy. He is disgusted with her, completely disgusted with her. "Stop the car right now."

    
She eases on the brake and shifts the car into neutral, and the Ford stops right behind her. Rudy gets out and walks toward it as the driver's window rolls down. Lucy has her window open, her pistol in her lap, and she watches the activity in her side-view mirror and tries to chase away her feelings. She feels stupid and embarrassed and angry and slightly afraid.

    
"You got a problem?" she hears Rudy say to the driver, definitely a Hispanic male, a young one.

    
"Me have a problem? I was just looking."

    
"Maybe we don't want you looking."

    
"It's a free country. I can fucking look. You have the problem, fuck you!"

    
"Go look somewhere else. Now get the hell out of here," Rudy says without raising his voice. "You follow us one more time, you're going to jail, you fucking piece of shit."

    
Lucy has the bizarre urge to laugh out loud as Rudy flashes his fake credentials. She is sweating and her heart is beating wildly, and she wants to laugh and get out of the car and kill the young Hispanic male, and she wants to cry, and because she understands nothing about her feelings, she sits behind the wheel of her Ferrari and doesn't move. The driver says something else that she can't make out and angrily drives off, squealing rubber. Rudy walks back to the Ferrari and climbs in.

    
"Way to go," he says as she slips back into the traffic on Atlantic. "Just some punk interested in your car, and you have to turn it into an international incident. First you think some cop's following you because the car's a black Crown Vic. Then you notice that your radar detector isn't detecting a damn thing, so next you think . . . what? What did you think? The Mafia? Some hit man who's going to take us out in the middle of a busy highway?"

    
She doesn't blame Rudy for losing his temper with her, but she can't allow it. "Don't yell at me," she says.

    
"You know what? You're out of control. You're unsafe."

    
"This is about something else," she says, trying to sound sure of herself.

    
"You're damn right it is," he retorts. "It's about her. You let someone stay in your house and look what happens. You could be dead. She sure as hell should be dead. And something worse is going to happen if you don't get
a grip."

    
"She was being stalked, Rudy. Don't make it my fault. It's not my fault."

    
"Stalked, you're damn right. She sure as hell was being stalked, and it sure as hell is your fault. If you would drive something like a Jeep ... or drive the Hummer. We have company Hummers. Why don't you drive one of those once in a while? If you hadn't let her drive your damn Ferrari. Showing off, Miss Hollywood. Jesus. In your damn Ferrari."

    
"Don't get jealous. I hate . . ."

    
"I'm not jealous!" he yells.

    
"You've been acting jealous since we hired her."

    
"This isn't about your hiring her! Hired her to do what? She's going to protect our LA. clients? What a joke! So you hired her to do what? To do what?"

    
"You can't talk to me like this," Lucy says quietly, and she is surprisingly calm, but she has no choice. If she fires back at him, then they'll really have a fight and he might do something terrible like quit.

    
"I won't be run out of my own life. I'll drive what I want and live where I want." She stares fiercely straight ahead, at the road, at the cars turning off on side streets and into parking places. "I'll be generous to whoever I want. She wasn't allowed to drive my black Ferrari. You know that. But she took it out and that's what started everything. He saw her, followed her, and then look what happens. It's nobody's fault. Not even hers. She didn't invite him to vandalize my car and follow her and try to kill her."

    
"Good. You live your life the way you want," Rudy replies. "And we'll just keep pulling into parking lots and maybe next time I'll beat up some innocent stranger who was just looking at your damn Ferrari. Hell, maybe I'll get to shoot someone. Or maybe I'll get shot. That would be even better, right? Me get shot over a stupid car."

    
"Calm down," Lucy says as she stops at a red light. "Please, calm down. I could have handled that better. I agree."

    
"Handled? I didn't notice you handling anything. You just reacted like an idiot."

    
"Rudy, stop it. Please." She doesn't want to get
so angry with him that she makes a mistake. "You can't talk to me like this. You can't. Don't make me pull rank."

    
She turns left on A1A, driving slowly along the beach, and several teenaged boys almost fall off their bicycles as they turn around to stare at her car. Rudy shakes his head and shrugs, as if to say, I rest my case. But talk about the Ferrari is no longer about the Ferrari. For Lucy to change the way she lives is to allow him to win, and she thinks of the beast as a him. Henri called him a beast, and he is a male beast, Lucy believes that. She has no doubt of that. The hell with science, the hell with evidence, the hell with everything. She knows damn well the beast is a him.

    
He is either a cocky beast or a stupid beast because he left two partial fingerprints on the glass-covered bedside table. He was stupid or careless to leave prints, or maybe he doesn't care. So far, the partial prints aren't matching up with any prints in any Automated Fingerprint Identification System, so maybe he doesn't have a ten-print card in any database because he's never been arrested or his prints have never been taken for some other reason. Maybe he didn't care when he left three hairs on the bed, three black head hairs, and why should he care? Even when a case is high priority, mitochondrial DNA analysis can take thirty to ninety days. There is no certainty that the results will be worth a damn because there is no such thing as a centralized and statistically significant mitochondrial DNA database, and unlike the nuclear DNA of blood and tissue, the mitochondrial DNA of hair and bones isn't going to tattle on the perpetrator's gender. The evidence the beast left doesn't matter. It may never matter unless he becomes a suspect and direct comparisons can be made.

    
"All right. I'm rattled. I'm not myself. I'm letting it get
to me," Lucy says, concentrating hard on her driving, worried that maybe she is losing control, that maybe Rudy is right. "What I did back there shouldn't have happened. Never. I'm too careful for that kind of shit."

    
"You are. She's not." Rudy's jaw is set stubbornly, his eyes blacked out by nonpolarized sunglasses that have a mirrored finish. Right now he refuses to give Lucy his eyes, and that bothers her.

    
"I thought we were talking about the Hispanic guy back there," Lucy replies.

    
"You know what I told you from day one," Rudy says. "The danger of someone living in your house. Someone using your car, your stuff. Someone flying solo in your airspace. Someone who doesn't know the same rules you and I do and sure as hell doesn't have our training. Or care about the same things we do, including us."

    
"Not everything in life should be about training," Lucy says, and it is easier to talk about training than whether someone you love really cares. It's easier talking about the Hispanic than Henri. "I should never have handled it like that back there, and I'm sorry."

    
"Maybe you've forgotten what life is really like," Rudy replies.

    
"Oh, please don't go into your Boy Scout Be Prepared shit," she snaps at him, and speeds up, going north, getting close to the Hillsboro neighborhood where her salmon-colored stucco Mediterranean mansion overlooks an inlet that connects the Intracoastal Waterway to the ocean. "I don't think you can be objective. You can't even say her name. Someone-this and Someone-that."

    
"Ha! Objective? Ha! You should talk." His tone is dangerously approaching cruel. "That stupid bitch has ruined absolutely everything.

    
And you didn't have a right to do that. You didn't have a right to drag me along for the ride. You didn't have a right."

    
"Rudy, we've got to stop fighting like this," Lucy says. "Why do we fight like this?" She looks at him. "Everything isn't ruined."

    
He doesn't answer her.

    
"Why do we fight like this? It's making me sick," she says.

    
They didn't used to fight. Now and then he sulked but he never turned on her until she opened the office in Los Angeles and recruited Henri from the LAPD. A deep horn blares out a warning that the drawbridge is about to go up, and Lucy downshifts and stops again, this time getting a thumbs-up from a man in a Corvette.

    
She smiles sadly and shakes her head. "Yeah, I can be stupid," she says. "Genetic wiring, bad wiring. From my crazy Latino biological father. Hopefully, not from my mother, although it would be worse to be like her. Much worse."

    
Rudy says nothing, staring at the rising bridge giving way to a yacht.

    
"Let's don't fight," she says. "Everything isn't ruined. Come on." She reaches over and squeezes his hand. "A truce? Start all over? Do we need to call in Benton for hostage negotiation? Because you're not just my friend and partner these days. You're my hostage, and I guess I'm yours, right? Here because you need the job or at least want the job, and I need you. That's just the way it is."

    
"I don't have to be anywhere," he says, and his hand doesn't move. His hand is dead under hers, and she lets go of it and moves away.

    
"How well I know," she replies, hurt that he wouldn't touch her, and she places her rejected hand back on the steering wheel. "I live with that fear all the time these days. You're going to say, I quit. Good-bye. Good riddance. Have a good life."

    
He stares at the yacht sailing through the open bridge, heading out to sea. The people on the deck of the yacht are dressed in Bermuda shorts and loose shirts, and move with the ease of the rare very rich. Lucy is very rich. But she has never believed it. When she looks at the yacht, she still feels poor. When she looks at Rudy, she feels poorer.

    
"Coffee?" she asks. "Will you have a coffee with me? We can sit out by that pool I never use and look out at the water I never notice in that house I wish I didn't have. I can be stupid," she says. "Have a coffee with me."

    
"Yeah, I guess." He stares out the window like a sulking little boy as Lucy's mailbox comes into view. "I thought we were taking that thing down," he says, indicating the mailbox. "You don't get
mail at your house. The only thing you might get
in that thing is something you don't want. Especially these days."

    
"I'll get the landscaper to take it down next time he comes," she says. "I haven't been here much. Opening the office down here and everything else. I feel like the other Lucy. The Lucy of
I
Love Lucy.
Remember that one when she's working in the candy factory and can't keep up because the candy's coming off the belt so fast?"