Assume Nothing (22 page)

The gun started to slide from Clarke’s grasp and he closed his fist to catch it, damn near firing off a round into the floor. He brought his arm up, set the Glock down in his lap, finger still on the trigger. He squinted in the direction of the door and mumbled an invitation under his breath: ‘Come on, motherfucker. Come on.’

His chin fell toward his chest, his eyes slid closed, and the dark of the living room slowly dissolved to full black.

A half-block away, crouched down in the back seat of Dana’s Ford sedan where he was all but invisible behind heavily tinted rear windows and the sunshade he’d propped up against the windshield, Reddick watched Clarke’s house and wondered what to make of it. He hadn’t seen a light glow from within in fifteen minutes, nor any motion at any of the windows. He was beginning to think that maybe he’d chosen the wrong place to look for Clarke and the others.

Or that they were better at playing possum than he would have suspected.

The latter was his best-case scenario, all three of the men he was after gathered inside, in one place together, having been spooked by Reddick’s call to Clarke earlier into huddling up like a pack of startled hens in a coop. It could all be over tonight, one way or another.

But if they were back at Cross’s crib instead, or at Sinnott’s out in Encino, or scattered across the goddamn universe at some combination of all three locations, the hunt would have to go on, until every one of them was dead or the police, finally alerted to his mission by Cross’s lady friend, found Reddick and locked him up.

Or worse.

Searching Clarke’s place for signs of life was like watching a mausoleum; there was nothing there to see. Reddick was edging up in his seat, about to take his surveillance efforts to Sinnott’s home in the San Fernando Valley, when an Acura coupe cruised silently past his window and parked directly in front of Clarke’s address. A man Reddick recognized as Will Sinnott got out, stopped to survey the street, then went up to the front door as Reddick reached for his binoculars. The porch, like the rest of the house, was pitch black, so it was impossible to be sure, but it looked to Reddick like Sinnott was ringing the bell.

Something he wasn’t likely to do, Reddick thought, unless he was expecting Clarke to be home.

Sinnott didn’t like it. Clarke wasn’t answering his phone or the doorbell and his house was as dark as a pool of ink. He was in no shape to go out and had called Perry less than an hour ago to ask what the hell was taking Sinnott so long to get there, so he had to be somewhere inside. The only thing Sinnott could figure was that the big man had taken another dose of his meds and fallen asleep again. Or had Reddick dropped by and . . . ?

Sinnott tried the bell one more time, knocked, and shouted Clarke’s name. Nothing. He’d wondered why Cross had told him to grab Clarke’s spare house keys before they’d left him here earlier that afternoon, but now the move made perfect sense. Cross’s capacity to anticipate the unexpected never ceased to amaze him.

With the trepidation of a diver entering a shark cage, he put the key in the lock and carefully opened the door.

From the farthest reaches of the cold, black sleep he had plunged into, the last note of a ringing doorbell having broken it, Clarke became vaguely aware of something pounding on his skull. Then someone called his name. A scratching, metal on metal, followed by . . . what? A footstep?

He raised his head, opened his eyes just in time to see the silhouette of a man, caught in relief against the open front door, easing catlike into his home. His reflexes were shot, dulled by drugs and sleep, but adrenaline made up the difference as he raised his right arm, aimed the Glock at Reddick – who else would it fucking be? – and fired: once, twice, three times.

He heard the man let out a low grunt, saw him drop to the floor on his face, no effort made to brace his fall, and grow still.

Relief and something else – Clarke thought it might be pride – washed over him, and suddenly the combined forces of Vicodin and exhaustion were drawing him back down to sleep again, dimming the lights on the world faster than he could gather the strength to fight it.

Reddick had been rushing across the front lawn, intending to catch Sinnott at the door before he could close it behind himself, when he heard the shots and saw Sinnott fall. He realized what had happened immediately: Clarke or Cross, or maybe even both, had mistaken Sinnott for him and cut him down in error. One down, two more to go, he thought. Smith & Wesson .40 out and at his side, he inched his way up to the porch, to one side of the door, and waited.

Nothing happened. The door stayed open, and no one appeared to drag Sinnott inside.

Reddick let a few more seconds go by, feeling increasingly conspicuous standing there on the porch with a gun in his hand, then crab-walked over to the door and, in a crouch, peeked inside the house.

In the dark, nothing stirred nor made a sound. Reddick sucked in a deep breath, dove across the threshold over Sinnott’s body and rolled up into a firing position . . .

Silence.

His eyes scanned the house for movement, any kind of movement, gradually adjusting to the dark. Breathing hard, heart pounding, he was finally able to make out the shape of a large man slumped over in a chair in what he assumed was the living room. Clarke. From all appearances, no more alive than Sinnott.

Reddick closed the front door and, with one eye on Clarke, checked Sinnott’s wrist for a pulse, afraid to leave anything more to chance. He didn’t find one. He slowly made his way over to the man in the chair, gun at the ready, heard him snoring before he reached him. He noted the Glock in the big man’s right hand and eased it from his grasp, encountering no resistance.

His first thought was to put a single round at the back of Clarke’s head, finish him quick and clean and get the hell out; his second was to check Sinnott’s body for the weapon he’d flashed at Cross’s condo earlier that day and, if he found it, use that gun to kill Clarke, work the room afterwards to make it look like the two men had shot each other.

But then Reddick spotted the bottle of prescription meds and a fifth of scotch on a coffee table next to Clarke’s chair, and two things immediately became clear to him: the cause of Clarke’s unshakable stupor, and the most efficient way possible to end his miserable life.

Between courses at
Ago
, where he was having dinner alone, it occurred to Cross that Ben Clarke might have been right all along.

Joe Reddick was a do-gooder and an ex-cop, not the kind of guy who would have heard about Gillis Rainey’s body being found in the LA River near the site of his accident with Andy Baumhower, put the two things together, and then remained silent about it. He would have gone to the police, sooner or later, and the only reason he hadn’t yet was Clarke’s intervention, as badly executed as it was. Reddick’s soft spot was his family, more so than Clarke could have ever suspected, and maybe it could still be used against him. Maybe, if they could get him to take Clarke’s original threat against his wife and son seriously again, they could stop him in his tracks or, failing that, at least slow him down long enough for them to deal with the more pressing problem that was Ruben Lizama.

They would need to find Reddick’s wife and kid and put them back under Clarke’s knife, let Reddick know their lives really and truly depended on him backing off
now
. But that wasn’t likely to be easy; Reddick almost certainly had them hidden away somewhere safe. He was far too smart to have them both just sitting there at home, waiting for Clarke to come back, while he was out running around all over the city trying to kill Clarke and his friends.

So where could they be?

Cross couldn’t begin to guess, but he thought he might know someone capable of finding out: Frank Blake. Blake was Iris Mitchell’s brother-in-law, an insurance investigator with whom Cross had partied on several occasions. He was a poseur and a prematurely balding windbag who was constantly trying to impress people with the access to information his profession afforded him, and Cross could only barely tolerate his company. But unless all his talk about his powers of investigative research was bullshit, tracking down Reddick’s family would be no problem for him.

Praying word of his messy break-up with Iris hadn’t already muddied the waters between them, Cross called Blake from the restaurant and posed the favor, making up a story on the spot about Reddick being a disgruntled ex-employee he wanted to keep tabs on in preparation for a baseless wrongful termination suit. In particular, Cross said, he wanted to know where Reddick might be spending his nights lately outside of his Los Angeles home.

Without sounding entirely sold on Cross’s reasons for asking, Blake said he’d see what he could do and would get back to him sometime the next day.

One night stands weren’t usually Cross’s thing, but later that night, a gift fell into his lap that he wasn’t about to turn down.

He’d gone to Primo Joe’s, Clarke’s nightclub in Century City, after dinner, just looking for a few drinks on the house and the diversion of a crowd in which to get lost, and without having to try, he’d made a friend at the bar within fifteen minutes. She was the raven-haired standout of a trio, falling all out of a black dress neither of her two girlfriends would have done half as much justice to. She caught a comment Cross made to the bartender that had the ring of authority to it and, surmising he was more than a mere regular here, proceeded to chat him up. Ordinarily, Cross would have only been interested in the banter – he had moved beyond half-drunk college co-eds in high heels and push-up bras long ago – but in the wake of being dumped, shit on, and blackmailed by Iris Mitchell, the timing seemed right for a little mindless fornication with a perfect stranger.

When they got around to deciding where they should go to do the deed, Cross offered to get them a room at the nearby Hyatt Regency, telling the girl – her name was actually ‘Danni’ – he couldn’t take her home because it was under the rubble of renovation, a lie she both mistook and appreciated as creative code for his being a married man.

At the Hyatt now, up in the suite he and Danni had just tumbled around in, Cross tried for the second time in almost two hours to reach Sinnott, not having spoken to him since dinner, when he’d told the fool to get over to Clarke’s place right away. Sinnott never called back to say he made it, nor responded to the voicemail message Cross left for him later, before Cross had left Primo Joe’s.

Lying naked in a sweat-soaked bed at the Hyatt, his date puttering around in the bathroom getting ready for Round Two, Cross found himself once again listening to Sinnott’s outgoing voicemail message instead of to Sinnott himself. He dialed Clarke’s number and netted similar results. This last was no real surprise; Clarke was probably asleep, up to his eyeballs in booze and painkillers. But even accounting for the annoying habit he had of choosing cell phone ringtones he could only hear half the time, Sinnott’s silence was disturbing, and Cross finally had to wonder if something were indeed amiss. Could Reddick have followed up his phone call to Clarke with a visit to his home?

Given time to think about it, wonder would have no doubt turned to concern, and concern on to apprehension. But Danni was out of the bathroom and on top of him again before Cross could even turn off his phone, and he couldn’t find the wherewithal to discourage her. Rather than the moderately amusing fuck he’d been expecting, the girl had turned out to be an extraordinary one, patient and generous and full of surprises, and once she started in on him, disarmed by alcohol as he was, the will to slow her down was not in his possession. So he gave himself up to the moment, telling himself he deserved this respite from the madness of the past week, and let Danni have her way with him, tossing his phone to the floor with all his clothes.

He couldn’t forget them completely, but for a while at least, Sinnott and Clarke and Joe Reddick were filed away in Cross’s mind under the heading of things he could worry about later.

TWENTY-SIX

N
ow there was only Cross.

With Clarke and Sinnott’s deaths tonight, Reddick’s original hit list of four people had been reduced to one, and that one man was Perry Cross. Reddick could see nothing else standing between himself and long-term peace of mind.

For a while, he toyed with the idea of leaving Cross to the authorities. From all appearances, he wasn’t half the thug Clarke had been, and even Sinnott had seemed more capable of engaging in physical violence. But Cross was the mastermind of the crew, the head of the serpent that had Reddick so terrified, and at his condo in Venice he had demonstrated a bent for cruelty that neither Sinnott nor Baumhower had shown. Clarke may have been the quartet’s most willing killer, but Reddick suspected Cross would prove to be its most persistent. Left alive for the law to do with him what it would, Cross would neither forget the debt he owed Reddick, nor act impulsively to repay it, as any of his three partners might have in his place. He would remember, and he would plan, and as soon as he was able, he would strike.

So like his friends, he had to die.

He wasn’t going to make himself an easy target, however. Reddick knew that. Which was why he wasn’t surprised when Cross never showed up at any of the three places he looked for him that night. He would have been a fool to go home, of course, but Reddick had hoped Cross would at least try crashing at either Clarke’s home or Sinnott’s instead. When midnight came and went and he had failed to appear at either residence, nor his own, Reddick reluctantly decided to postpone the hunt for him until morning, realizing he might be waiting for a man who had jumped on a plane and fled Los Angeles – if not the continental United States – hours ago.

Unlike Cross, Reddick had no compunction about sleeping in his own bed that night. He had avoided this luxury long enough, and the thought of Cross coming to look for him at home was hardly a deterrent. If he couldn’t defend himself in his own abode against an amateur like Cross, Reddick thought, he deserved to die.