Assume Nothing (24 page)

Iris.

Iris would have to be dealt with, of course. Her perpetual silence either purchased or forced upon her, one or the other. But that was something else Cross was confident he could accomplish, given an hour or two of unfettered thought to consider the problem. He had experience handling Iris; putting her in check for good would be a piece of cake. All he had to do was figure out how to make a dead man out of Reddick before Reddick made a dead man out of him.

Cross slowed the car, steadied his breathing, and eased his grip on the steering wheel, willing himself down from the state of all-out panic he’d allowed to overtake him. He had to start thinking clearly again if he wanted to survive. What to do first?

Make sure Will Sinnott and Ben Clarke were really dead, he decided. Assuming that was the case when it wasn’t would be foolish and counterproductive. Sinnott had a gun and knew how to use it, but if Clarke were still alive, fucked up as he was, he would make for a better ally. Clarke knew people Cross and Sinnott did not, the kind of people who’d be willing and able to either shut Reddick down themselves or help Cross and Clarke do it on their own. They wouldn’t work for free, but that was OK.

Cross began driving with a purpose now, doubling back on the freeway to head for Clarke’s office at Nightshades, his nightclub in Santa Monica. Finding his friend there would be nothing short of a miracle, one that defied all logic, but he didn’t care. Hoping for miracles was what he was down to at this point and shooting his brains out, just to save Reddick the trouble, was his only other alternative.

There was a lone car he didn’t recognize in the club’s parking lot when he arrived, a white GMC Yukon in nondescript trim, and his heart soared with relief. It had to be Clarke’s, he thought, something the big man had rented or borrowed to throw Reddick off the scent. Reddick himself would have never parked a car here so conspicuously and, this early in the morning, it was unlikely to belong to one of Clarke’s employees. Cross parked his Escalade in an adjacent space, jumped out, and went to the Yukon’s side glass to peer into its interior.

The man in the passenger seat, beside a beefy driver with dark brown skin, rolled his window down and showed Cross a warm smile.

‘Perry, what’s up? Come, get in. We can wait for our friend Ben together,’ Ruben Lizama said.

TWENTY-EIGHT

T
oday was the day it would all be over. Reddick had no more need for patience or stealth. His plan now was simple: Find Cross and kill him. Lay his weapon down immediately thereafter and wait for the police to cuff him. No muss, no fuss.

He couldn’t trust Iris Mitchell to stay out of his way, so he’d left her this morning at his place, bound and gagged in his bedroom as she had been for most of the night. If the two of them were lucky, she wouldn’t be there much longer. Cross would be dead by noon and, at Reddick’s urging, the cops would show up to rescue her soon thereafter.

Reddick’s first stop today had been Cross’s condo in Santa Monica. He’d arrived just after eight a.m. and departed less than ten minutes later, having completed a seek and destroy mission that was a model of speed and efficiency: He blasted his way into Cross’s building, searched every room of his unit, and got out as soon as it became obvious Cross wasn’t there, fleeing the scene in Dana’s sedan almost too quickly for more than a pair of potential witnesses to take note of him.

Now he was sitting in the waiting area of Cross’s office in Century City, flipping through the pages of a magazine while listening to every word Cross’s receptionist – a short, zaftig Asian with braces on her teeth – spoke into the phone. He’d flashed an old private security badge at her when he walked in, told her he was here to see Cross regarding the matter of the burglary at Andy Baumhower’s residence over the weekend. Mr Cross wasn’t in, she’d said, but Reddick was welcome to wait for him if he cared to. Reddick, satisfied she wasn’t feeding him a line, accepted the offer and sat down.

He was taking a calculated risk, setting a trap for Cross he might see right through should he call in and hear that a ‘cop’ was there waiting for him, but Reddick simply lacked the will to do anything else. This was his last stand. The havoc he’d wreaked at Cross’s condo, the callous disregard he’d shown for anyone who might have had the misfortune of getting in his way, had taken something out of him. Maybe for the first time in days, he was able to see the sick, rabid dog he had become, the murderer of unarmed men, and the realization left him too spent to go on chasing Cross forever. He still wanted Cross dead, he still
needed
him dead, but the blind, white hot rage that had made his killing of Andy Baumhower and Ben Clarke possible was something Reddick no longer possessed.

Cross had to come to
him
now. Either inadvertently or by way of deception, it didn’t matter which. And he had to do it fast, before Reddick lost the courage altogether to kill him.

Twenty minutes went by, then thirty. The girl behind the receptionist’s desk answered three incoming calls as he listened, advising the person on the other end of the line each time that Mr Cross wasn’t in. Reddick began to get antsy. He picked up another magazine, nearly tore its cover off peeling it open. He could see the LAPD uniforms now, poring over the wreckage of Cross’s condominium, calling in a general description of the armed man one of Cross’s neighbors had seen running down the hall on his way out of the building . . .

The door opened behind him and Reddick looked up, saw two people enter the room and approach the receptionist: a black woman and a white man, both middle-aged, the former dressed like a well-heeled attorney, the latter a used car salesman on the skids. The guy gave Reddick a brief glance, then turned back around. Reddick had never laid eyes on either him or his friend before, but he knew who – or
what
– they were in an instant.

‘May I help you?’ the receptionist asked.

Finola Winn showed her the contents of a brown leather ID folio, said, ‘I’m Detective Winn, this is Detective Lerner. We’re here to see Perry Cross.’

The girl behind the desk made a face, pinned between the twin forces of confusion and surprise. ‘Is Mr Cross in some kind of trouble?’ she asked.

Winn and Norm Lerner traded a glance.

‘Not necessarily. We just need to ask him a few questions, that’s all,’ Winn said. ‘Is he in?’

‘You mean questions about the burglary at Mr Baumhower’s place?’

‘Who?’

‘Mr Baumhower. I thought . . . Well, aren’t you all here about the same thing?’

She craned her neck to see past the two detectives, and turning around to follow her gaze, they saw that the man who’d been sitting there earlier was suddenly gone.

TWENTY-NINE

F
or the first time in his life, Cross didn’t trust himself to tell a lie. He was sure that a lie would get stuck in his throat, and that Ruben would kill him on the spot, right there in the car in the parking lot of Ben’s club. So he did the next best thing and offered Ruben a highly modified version of the truth, laying the blame for everything that had gone wrong over the last thirteen days at the feet of Joe Reddick.

‘Who the fuck is Joe Reddick?’ Ruben asked.

Cross said Reddick was some crazy Andy Baumhower had once done business with who’d been trying to extort money from him for months, and when Baumhower wouldn’t pay him off, the asshole went ballistic. First he’d killed Baumhower, then gone after his three Class Act partners, possibly killing Ben Clarke and Will Sinnott as well, Cross wasn’t sure. He described the visit he’d just paid to Clarke’s home and how the test call he’d made to Sinnott’s cell phone had all but convinced him that both men were inside the house, dead.

Ruben listened intently to all of this, mild curiosity turning into something far more incendiary right before Cross’s eyes as he began to suspect what Cross was leading up to.

‘This is all terrible news,’ he said. ‘I like Ben, and I hope you’re wrong about him being dead. But none of this has anything to do with me, does it? Or the money you’re going to pay me Friday, as agreed?’

Cross tried to make his mouth move, failed, and tried again. ‘No. No, of course not,’ he stammered. ‘It’s just . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Reddick. Goddamn Reddick. His interference has made it damn near impossible for us to function. We’ve got your money, Ruben, that’s not a problem, but it’s not all in one place, and we were in the process of gathering it all together when Reddick started fucking with us. If not for him, I’d be handing you what we owe you right now, I swear to God.’

‘I don’t care about “right now.” What I care about is what you intend to give me four days from now. If Ben and Andy and your other friend – Will? – are all dead like you say—’

‘I can still get the money for you. All by myself, every penny of it. But I can’t do it and worry about Reddick, too. I need him out of the way so I can work without having to look over my fucking shoulder every five seconds.’

‘I don’t understand. You’ve reported this man to the police, yes? After he killed Andy? So why haven’t they found him by now?’

‘I don’t know,’ Cross lied, unable to see where he had any alternative. Their reasons for having never turned the police on to Reddick were all related to their catastrophic kidnapping of Gillis Rainey, and that was something Cross had already decided to withhold from Ruben, lest he realize how desperate they’d been, only two weeks ago, to raise his quarter million dollars. ‘The guy’s smart. He knows things. If he were easy to find, we would have found him and killed him ourselves.’

‘You know what I think? I think this is all bullshit,’ Ruben said, finally showing a flash of anger. ‘I think you can’t pay me, and Ben and the others have all run away and left you – what is the expression? – “holding on to the bag.” So you tell me this ridiculous story about Joe Reddick so I’ll give you enough time to maybe run away, too.’

‘No!
No!
’ Cross cried. ‘I’m telling you the truth, I swear it!’

‘Perhaps you do not understand how great an insult it will be if, on Friday, you cannot keep the promise you all made to me. I trusted you and Ben; I believed you when you told me you could take dirty money and make it clean. If I have to go back to my family now and tell them it was a mistake to do business with you . . .’

‘Please. You have to believe me. I can still get you your money. I just need the rest of the week to work on it. Without any more distractions from Reddick.’

‘Reddick, Reddick. Joe Reddick!
Fuck
this Joe Reddick!’

Ruben turned to his man Poeto, who could have been a mustachioed, oversized test dummy propped behind the car’s wheel for all the interest he’d shown to this point in their conversation.

‘¿
Qué piensas, Poeto? ¿Será mierda, ó no? Debo de creer lo que me dice esta perrita gringa, o será que le clavo mi pinche cuchillo en su ojo.
’

The driver gave Cross a disinterested look, as if examining a spoiled piece of meat. ‘
Patrón, yo no creo que él tenga los huevos para mentírle. Pero tal vez él tenga demasiado miedo para no intentarlo. Quizá deberíamos ir a la casa del Señor Clarke y ahi nos darémos cuenta sí sus amigos estan muertos como él dice.
’

As Cross watched, his inability to understand a word of the exchange he had just heard magnifying his sense of doom, Ruben nodded, the driver’s answer to his questions apparently meeting his approval. Ruben turned back to Cross, said, ‘You will take us to Ben’s house now. If there are two dead men inside like you say, I will give you four more days to meet your obligations to me. And I will personally see to it that this
puta
“Joe Reddick” – if there really is such a person – doesn’t bother you anymore.’

Cross started to exhale with relief, until he saw Ruben reach into a jacket pocket and withdraw a small, military-style folding knife. Opening the stubby, curved blade, Ruben said, ‘But first, I must ask you to convince me that this will not all be a waste of my time. If you want me to believe that everything you are telling me is true, you need to offer me some token of your good intentions. Otherwise . . .’

Cross broke into a cold sweat, unable to turn his eyes away from the razor-like weapon Ruben was rolling around in his hand like a toy. ‘I don’t . . . What do you want me to do?’

Ruben smiled. ‘There is this thing gangsters do in Japan. It is called “
Yubitsume
.” When they have fucked something up very badly, to show the members of their clan how sorry they are, they cut a finger off. Sometimes, more than one. I saw it in a movie once. It was
sick
.’

By the grin on his face, it was clear to Cross that Ruben’s use of the word ‘sick’ was as a euphemism for something that had excited him to the point of orgasm.

‘And you
are
sorry, right, Perry? That I must kill a man I do not know, and wait four more days for you to pay me what you owe me, because you have made it necessary for me to do so?’

Cross could feel the contents of his stomach grow instantly rancid, and if his life had not depended on his doing nothing to upset Ruben further, he would have given in to the urge to vomit all over the man’s rental car. He wasn’t ready to mutilate himself, but he wasn’t ready to die, either. And yet Ruben was waiting for him to choose between the two.

Cross nodded his head and put a quavering hand out for the knife.

After Winn commandeered a freight elevator, flashing her badge and barking orders at a maintenance man she found standing in an open utility closet, she and Lerner caught the guy they’d seen up in Cross’s office down in the lobby, just as he was about to exit the building. Lerner kept asking his partner all the way down what they were doing, chasing after somebody who wasn’t the man they’d come here to see, but if Winn knew the answer, she was keeping it to herself.

Sucking wind, Winn introduced herself and Lerner, displaying her badge yet again, and the guy just looked at them like two kids trying to sell magazine subscriptions for the annual school fundraiser.