Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (2 page)

“Courtney Cleary?” I said.

“Yeah, hey there. It’s so great to finally meet you.” She pulled open the door to make space for us.

As we had discussed, Anne waited for me to go first.

Before entering the room, I scanned the place: there was one of those standard-issue motel-room coffee pots, a couple of pens on the desk, a pair of white headphones on the floor. A suitcase with most of its contents dumped out took up most of the queen-sized bed. Roger sat on the free space next to the clothes. By the window were two plastic chairs and a small table. I didn’t know what sort of things they might have in the bathroom, but I could make do with most of what was at hand here, if things went bad.

“You’re the writer?” Courtney asked me.

Anne stuck her hand out. “Hi, I’m Anne da Silva, I’m the journalist.”
 

Courtney shook her hand out of obligation. Her fingernails were ragged. “Who are you?” she asked me.

I didn’t offer my hand. “Drusilla.”

When I didn’t offer any more than that, Courtney nodded. “We’re going to take pictures first, right?” The way she said
right
took five syllables.
 

“Where do you come from?” I asked.

The blonde woman’s smile was immediate and infectious. I could see her being a cheerleader. “Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. You ever been there?”

I shook my head.
 

“It’s outside Tulsa.”

Every time she spoke, I memorized how she slurred her vowels in case I ever needed to pretend to be from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, outside Tulsa. The vowels are the key to accents. After I’m confident of those, I practice the diphthongs.

“Oh, no,” Anne said. “Let’s talk a little bit here and then go outside. That okay?”

Anne and Courtney sat in the chairs by the window. Courtney pressed the sides of her cutoffs into her legs as she sat down, which seemed slightly bizarre. She also hunched herself forward. It might have looked like she was pushing her breasts up and out, but to me it looked as though she were trying to protect herself.
 

I leaned against a corner of the desk, forming a triangle between the women on the chairs by the window and Roger on the bed. He kept watching me, his eyes narrow.
 

“And you’re Roger, right?” I asked.

He flapped his hand at the desk I was leaning against. “Hey, move away from the desk.”
 

Telling a complete stranger what to do and not even saying, “Please.” Alarm signal number one.
 

“Move?” I asked.

“Just...there. Move. Over there.” He waved in the general vicinity of Anne and Courtney.

I had no intention of crowding us all into one area. “I’m comfortable here, thanks.” I pulled out the desk chair and sat down, the chair’s back to the desk. The coffee pot was within reach, albeit I’d have to bend backward slightly to get to it.

“Where are you from?”
 

“London,” I lied. At the moment, in this life, I was using a British accent. My normal speaking voice is probably standard American, but I haven’t used it in so long I’m not even certain anymore. In real life, I hail from New York. Manhattan. Upper East Side of Manhattan, to be exact. Also, my birth name isn’t Drusilla Thorne. Anne was the closest thing I had to a friend in Los Angeles, and she didn’t know any of that about me. Most of the people I’ve known in my life haven’t heard my real voice or my real name and I was perfectly content to let the situation remain that way. “Have you been?”
 

He wasn’t paying attention to me. He was bouncing in place on the bed, watching Courtney and Anne. “Want to party while they talk?” he asked.

Everything is about the drugs for drug users. They’re so boring. The users, that is. Sometimes the drugs are, too, depending on what they are. Even when the drugs are exciting, however, they usually come with users attached, most of them hoping for a free ride, and every single one of them is beyond boring.
 

“No, thank you, not interested,” I said.
 

“Man, you make a simple ‘no’ sound snotty.”
 

I shrugged. “It’s eleven in the morning.”

“Time for a pick-me-up.” His grin most decidedly didn’t make me feel warm.
 

Courtney and Anne were still talking. Courtney’s mouth was downturned and her blue eyes were wide and wet, like she was about to start crying. Whatever was under discussion was making Courtney upset.

Dammit. Anne did not need to go in-depth here. How long did it take to get a silly interview?
 

“C’mon, let’s party,” Roger said.

“You go ahead.”
 

“You want to get something to take with?”
 

A good salesman wants to get the customer to stop saying “No” and start saying “Yes.” A great one knows when to back off. “No, thank you,” I said.

Roger kept glancing over at them, paying attention to whatever Courtney was saying. She was talking about how she and Roger were going to use the money from the reunion special to move and start a family.

“Courtney! Shut up about that!” he yelled.

The girl flinched. Anne looked up in alarm.

I wondered what she’d said. But I didn’t care that much. What I cared about was that he’d just given alarm signal number two: yelling at someone who wasn’t already yelling at him. I tapped my fingers in a V across my mouth. Anne looked at me and nodded. She’d picked up that things were not good. If I got to three—and that seemed likely, given how hard Roger seemed to be pushing the drugs on me—we were gone. We hadn’t had this much trouble in Baldwin Park.

“What do you do now?” I asked Roger, as though he hadn’t screamed at Courtney three seconds before.
 

He was still eyeing her. “I’m on a show.” The vaguest of all possible job descriptions in a town where everyone I ran into was peripherally involved with the movie/TV business. Of course, I lived with a famous actor, and it was amazing how fast people became peripheral around a star. “What about you?”
 

“Not much yet. I only moved here a few months ago.” My lack of steady employment was as much by design as it was anything else.

“Oh? Where from?”

“Las Vegas.”

“Yeah? Cocktail waitress?” He grinned. His teeth seemed stained. Perhaps he was a cigarette smoker. The discoloration seemed darker than the usual yellowish smoking tint. Probably used products more serious than tobacco. Meth was a possibility.

“Psychic advisor.”

His foot dropped to the ground by the bed. “No shit?”

“No shit.”
 

“Yeah? You really psychic? You got the second sight?”

Courtney swiveled around in her chair, whatever she was saying to Anne completely forgotten. “You’re a psychic? Really?”
 

That accent. I could see why she’d have trouble getting work in Hollywood, because the words were nearly impenetrable. But it remained unadulterated by the American Standard accent everyone was rushing to adopt. I rolled her vowels around in my head.
 

Her teeth didn’t look so great, either. Not a great look for someone who wanted to be known for being beautiful.

“Can you read me?” she asked.
 

Roger jumped off the bed and yelled “No!” at Courtney.

There’s two kinds of people who don’t want to talk to psychics: those who think psychics are frauds, and those who are worried the psychics know something. People who think psychics are frauds are, for the most part, annoyed by them, not deeply angry toward them.
 

Roger’s immediate anger—signaling the accompanying fear that I was going to learn something—worried me. Alarm signal number three, everybody scramble into the lifeboats. Now.
 

“Anne.” I stood up.

She reached for her bag. “It’s okay, we’re done.”

Roger pointed at me, his arm extended and held rigid. “Hold on a minute.”

I held up both hands, palms out. “We’re going now. You two have fun.”

“Roger, calm yourself down,” Courtney told him.
 

Her placid voice seemed to enrage him further. “Shut up, Court.” He stalked toward me, crowding me up against the desk. “Why are you here?”
 

“Get away from me,” I told him.
 

He stood right in front of me. “Shut the fuck up, bitch.” Spittle flew out of his mouth and landed on my face.

He wasn’t someone on my list to French kiss anytime soon. He didn’t rate having his saliva anywhere on my face.

I held his gaze and didn’t blink. “My friend and I are leaving. Back away.”

“You looking for something here?” he yelled. He reached for the desk drawer.

Which was right behind me. So he had to press up against me to get to it. And he put his hand on my stomach to pin me in place.

Yeah. That wasn’t happening.

I raised my leg and stomped down on his foot as hard as I could, and when he startled I elbowed him in the stomach sharply. Then I did it again. He staggered back against the bed with the clothes on it.
 

“Roger!” Courtney screamed.

“Jesus Christ,” Anne added.

I looked at Anne. “The car!”

She opened the room’s door. “Come on!” she yelled at Courtney, which surprised me. Not only was she trying to get Courtney out of there, but she’d clearly decided I could handle myself.

“Roger, stop,” Courtney said.

And Roger reached out and shoved her, this wispy girl who probably didn’t weigh over one hundred pounds. She flew backward and her head cracked against the edge of the table she’d been sitting at with Anne. Her head made a dull
thwopp
when it hit, like a fat softball at a slow speed.

I kicked Roger in the crotch, hard. I’d worn boots for a reason. If I’m going to fight, I plan on inflicting permanent physical injury. When it’s down to me or the other guy, I plan on being the one to walk away.
 

Roger folded into a tight ball and vomited on the carpet. Great. I could ignore him for a bit, then.

Anne ran over to where Courtney lay, moaning. That she was making any noise was a good sign. If someone doesn’t make any noise or move within a very short time after getting hit in the head, they might have a serious brain injury or cranial bleeding.

“Get in the bloody car!” I yelled.
 

Turned out Roger wasn’t quite as incapacitated as I’d thought he was. He reached out and grabbed my ankle, which pulled me backward to the ground. I landed on my back and my head hit the floor. He launched himself with a surprising burst of energy on top of me, landing a weak but stinging punch to the side of my ribcage, followed by a hit to the side of my face. That one hurt much more than the ribcage one did.

“Bitch!” he yelled.
 

Bitch
: the modern version of the
kiai
from martial arts. Tiresome.
 

Instead of taking advantage of his superior position and really hammering me into the thin carpet, he reached up, toward that desk drawer he seemed so damned fixated on.

His agitation about that desk warned me I’d better keep Roger from getting into that drawer if any of us were going to get out of here alive.
 

“Call 911!” I added.

Behind me I heard Anne finally jump up and run out of the room. The sounds of traffic on West 3
rd
Street nearby were loud and the warm outdoor breeze wafted over me, so the door was open, thank God. Perhaps someone passing by could create enough of a distraction that I could really lay the hurt on Roger.
 

I reached up and jabbed my fingers into the underside of his throat. He twisted away from the drawer and toward me, which gave me enough time to push him backward into the desk chair. Which took him off me and allowed me to scramble to my feet and take stock of the situation.

Anne: outside. Good.

Courtney was pushing herself into a sitting position, holding the side of her head and squinting in pain. Tears leaked out of her eyes without any sobbing motion on her part. And she was looking at Roger. Instead of, you know, getting the hell out of there.

I wasn’t going to waste time saving her if she wasn’t invested in saving herself.
 

I dashed out of the room and into the parking lot, where Anne’s car idled, waiting for me, pointed toward the exit. I yanked open the door, jumped in, and said, “Drive!”
 

She drove. I didn’t have my seatbelt on before she took the first right and I damn near flew into the driver’s seat. Hermes Trismegistus, my entire left side hurt. He must have gotten a good punch in.
 

“Are you okay?” Her voice was wavering, like she was about to lose her entire mind.

“I’m okay. Drive somewhere public. And fast.”

“He had a gun,” she said. She pressed her hand over her mouth and started hyperventilating. “I think he had a gun!”
 

So I was right about the drawer. I was willing to bet he had a few other things in there, but I didn’t care. We were out.
 

Now that the adrenaline rush was over, I realized my back hurt from where I had hit the floor. The back of my head hurt, too. And my jaw was beginning to throb with pain from where he’d punched me. My left side hurt from where I’d bashed into Anne. Today was not my day.

Anne kept turning her head to look at me, which terrified me given how erratic her driving was right now. Up ahead was the familiar large red oval marking a Ralph’s supermarket. I jabbed my finger at the parking lot. “Drive! There! What are you looking at? Is he behind us?”
 

She shook her head, vibrating back and forth. “Oh God oh God oh God.”
 

“Park, would you?” My stomach felt like crap.
 

The car thumped over the uneven curb cut into the Ralph’s parking lot. The jostling made me feel like I was going to vomit all over myself. “Park, and stop moving this car.”

She parked the car. I don’t think she lined it up between the lines very well. L.A. drivers tend to be cavalier about following parking space recommendations.