Hailey's War (32 page)

“I know,” I said.

“Good luck, then,” he said. Then he turned to his driver. “Please take Miss Cain wherever she needs to go.”

The quickest way out of state would have been to get to southern Nevada, or
to Arizona. The roads in that direction were also more lightly traveled than those going north, which was a good thing when you were driving a stolen car, like I was—I'd had Marsellus's driver take me back to where I'd left it, apparently unnoticed and untagged. I'd get rid of it as soon as I could afford to.

All in all, I really didn't want to get on the 101 north. More than that, I didn't want to go into San Francisco. It was Skouras land. But I had to. Most of what was in my room over Shay's office I didn't need, but there was the small matter of my new driver's license, which I'd arranged to have mailed there; I wasn't going so deep underground that I wouldn't need that. Then there was my
Wheelock's Latin
, and inside that was my birth certificate and my only photo of my father.

So in Oxnard I got off the road and made a phone call. Shay didn't sound happy to hear my voice, but I had paid him his rent in full, so he didn't have a lot of grounds on which to act aggrieved.

“Has anyone been around looking for me?” I asked him, trying to sound casual.

In Gualala, I'd unwisely identified myself to Quentin as a “one-hundred-thirty-five-pound bike messenger.” There weren't that many messenger services in the city. If Skouras's guys had wanted to, they could have narrowed it down.

“Looking for you? No,” Shay said. “You're not in trouble with the cops, are you? Jesus, that's all I need.”

“No,” I said. “It's not that. But I'm thinking, can you maybe grab a few things, and I can meet you somewhere else? Like your place?”

It was hard to imagine Skouras's men staking out my place long-term, but as Serena would have told me, it's paranoia that keeps you alive.

“You can't just go and get what you want?” he demanded, irritated.

“I'm sorry,” I told him. “I can't.”

“Fine,” he sighed, sounding exasperated. “Tell me what you need and I'll get it.”

“Thanks. It's not much, I promise,” I said.

Shay had given me directions to an address at the edge of the Haight. Parking
was easier than it should have been, but then, it was two days until Christmas. Some of Shay's neighbors were likely out of town, traveling to visit relatives. The many darkened windows around me testified to that.

But at Shay's place, a tall, narrow Victorian, light glowed behind the closed blind of the front window. I climbed the front steps and rang his doorbell.

Shay answered his door dressed in jeans and a sweater.

“What's up?” I said. “Thanks for doing this.”

“Hailey,” he said, inclining his head for me to step inside. “Come on back.”

I followed him across the smooth polished wood of a short entry hall. When we entered the living room, I saw figures on the periphery of my vision and turned sharply to recognize them: Babyface and Quentin.

I went for the SIG, but not fast enough. A third guy stepped out of the shadows and grabbed me, twisting me around into a rigid and painful hold.

Quentin swaggered forward. His dark-blond hair was freshly cut and his face was bright with enjoyment.

“Well, look who it is,” he said. “It's Staff Sergeant Henry Cain's daughter, Hailey.” He smiled widely. He'd been imagining saying that for some time now.

I looked at Shay. “You bastard.”

I would have liked to think that Shay hadn't done this willingly,
that they'd braced him and threatened everything he held dear, but he didn't have the strained look of someone whose home and life had been invaded. Instead, his eyes were hooded, the guarded expression of guilt.

“Was it money?” I asked.

He shrugged. “If you give these guys what they want, you'll come out of this just fine.”

“No, I won't, Shay,” I told him.

Quentin had called it, long ago in Gualala:
You'll be dead by Christmas
. That was two days from now, and all signs suggested I was not going to live that long. In the words of the first Bridge suicide:
This is as far as I go
.

Babyface said to Quentin, “Go get the car.”

It was morning on the Gulf Coast, maybe around ten or so. My little bar and
grill was out at the end of the pier. The waters of the Gulf looked a lot like the Pacific. A gentle breeze, which should have been tangy and salt-scented, jangled the clear glass bulbs strung along the roofline, the ones I'd light up tonight when we were open for business.

Right now I was at work at a big tin sink like you saw in fish markets, the kind with a white cutting board on the side. The surface of the cutting board had the shallow marks of many knives in it. I was cutting into a catfish with the boning knife I'd once held on Serena. Occasionally I washed away the catfish's blood with an extendable hose that could be pulled out from the faucet, but there was always more. The smell of blood obscured that of the ocean.

I scraped viscera over to one side, kept slicing. My hand hurt a little bit, the little finger that Babyface had broken. I'd thought it was healed, but now it stung.

“Hey, sugar.”

CJ's long arms slipped around me, and he put his face down into my hair, the way he used to when we'd gone dancing together.

“Hey,” I said. “I'm glad you're here.”

“What are you making?”

“Catfish. You wanted me to learn to fix something Cajun for you. This was just caught.” I nudged my chin at the choppy ocean. “Out there.”

CJ said, “Catfish is a river fish.”

My hand, holding the knife, shook a little. “Then it's swordfish,” I said, and suddenly it was.

“Are you sure they catch swordfish around here?”

“Why are you making this so hard?” I demanded, slapping the knife down. “It has to be something, CJ.
I need something to explain the smell of the blood.”

Scent was the hardest sense to re-create in memory or imagination. I wished I could create the smell of salt water for this, but I couldn't. I smelled only blood. This was a fragile fantasy, too ready to fall apart.

“I'm so sorry, baby,” he said.

“I am, too,” I said.

I turned around to look at him, the wind playing with his reddish-blond hair and the material of his loose white shirt. He was wearing undoubtedly expensive sunglasses with lenses that looked smoked, like something from the Victorian era. He seemed at ease, unhurt, and I was happy, too, because whatever happened to me, CJ was safe in his
vita felix
.

I put my arms up around his neck and drew him to me. “I've been so stupid,” I said, murmuring against his neck.

“How?” he asked.

There was a chaplain at school who used to favor that passage from Ecclesiastes, with the refrain
All is vanity
. And it was, my whole life. Not just the past few months, running around pretending I could be the protector of innocent girls and newborn babies, imagining I could thwart Skouras and his whole machine, but even before that, my dream of being a second lieutenant in the Army, of commanding my own troops and making the world a little safer. All of it, vanity.

How many of the stupid, glory-seeking things I'd done had been to burn up the frustrated energy of not being able to have him? What a bloody fucking waste. So what if some of his genes were some of my genes? Who the hell cared? Now I was going to die, far away, having protected him but never fully loved him.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Shhh,” CJ said. “Baby, it's all right. I'm going to help you.” He cupped his hands under my jawline and kissed me, then his hands went to my shoulders, gently pushing me down.

I went with what he wanted, kneeling and pushing up his shirt and rubbing my cheek against the skin of his flat stomach, then unhooking his belt and pulling his faded Levi's down. My hands left streaks of blood on his bare thighs but it didn't bother him, or me. I took him deep in my mouth.

“That's it,” he said, leaning back against the railing of the pier. “Good girl.”

CJ's hands, the ones that cupped my nascent breasts at thirteen, now spread through my hair and against the bones of my skull. “Everything's all right, baby,” he said.

The lightbulbs swayed in the wind, and I closed my eyes and concentrated on his rhythm.

“Hailey,”
he said, “Hailey, I love you,” and his hands tightened convulsively in my hair as he finished.

And suddenly I was on the floor, my face against dirty, industrial-gray carpet
, coughing and choking. The fantasy broke up because when Quentin finished making me give him head at gunpoint, he pulled me off him and shoved me unceremoniously facedown on the floor. I hadn't been able to break my fall because my hands were cuffed behind my back.

Jack Foreman had said that Skouras sold off his line of X-rated movie houses years ago, but maybe he couldn't get rid of all the holdings, because here I was, in the projection booth of a long-closed theater. There was a big rectangle of carpet missing where the projector had been wrenched up to be sold off. But there was still an editing table in the back. From my position on the floor, I could see the drying blood that had dripped off the edges of the table, and a little more on the carpet.

That was why, in the fantasy, my once-broken finger had been stinging so badly. I no longer had a once-broken finger. Babyface had taken it off with a pair of tin snips, while one of his two helpers held my arm in place. They hadn't bandaged it. It had clotted and stopped bleeding on its own, but that had been the main part of the
torture: watching my hand spurt blood and not being able to put pressure on it. Humans are hardwired to do almost anything to keep our blood in our bodies where it belongs. The pain of losing a finger had been secondary to that psychological drive to do anything,
anything
, to make the bleeding stop.

I wasn't strong. I'd actually said, “Marsellus,” while I was watching my hand spurt blood. None of them had understood it. Babyface said, “What?,” and before I could repeat myself, I'd heard an inner voice say,
You got up. You got up and walked
.

And it was true. In Mexico, Skouras's men had taken me off the road to shoot me, far enough away that I wasn't supposed to have been found and helped. They'd left me there. At some point after, I'd opened my eyes and seen the rising moon, and somehow, with two holes in me, I'd gotten up and staggered to the road's edge, because that had been the only way I was going to live.

That memory gave me an inkling of pride. Just enough not to say,
The baby's with Lucius Marsellus
.

And when I didn't, they'd decided to try something else to break me down.

I thought I'd figured out the division of labor. Will, the short, dark-haired guy, was just hired muscle; his heart wasn't in any of it. Babyface was in charge, and it was he who wielded the compression shears. But Quentin had center stage now, and he was clearly relishing his role as the witty sociopath. If his erection was at half-mast now, his ego was at full mast.

He leaned over me. “I gotta tell you, considering the circumstances, that was
not
the worst blow job I ever had,” he said. “You really got into that toward the end. Did you think it was gonna buy you some goodwill with me?”

He pulled up his trousers, got himself arranged. I rolled onto my side. The passages inside my nose were starting to swell, but I didn't think they were going to bleed. They'd toughened up from too many hits already.

All together and spruce again, Quentin said, “Okay, let's review
what we've learned.” He held up a didactic finger. “This hasn't been educational for you, actually, so much as it's been for
us
. See, we've done only two things to you so far, but they were important things. These”—he picked up and shook the tin snips—“and that really lovely knob job.”

He set down the snips. “The thing with women is, they tend to fall into two camps. Some of them can take a lot of pain, but they can't stand anything sexual being done to them. Other women can let a whole freak show of guys ball them, so long as you don't hurt them physically.” He sat on his heels, the better to look into my face. “So the first thing I do, with a woman, is see which group she falls into. You might not even have known which one you were.”

He was having such a good time.

“Before I share my observations with you, why don't you tell me which one you think you are.”

I didn't say anything. There was no point. They really were going to kill me.
Amissa mundo sum
, I was lost to the world.

The one person I'd failed to protect was myself. I understood why I hadn't, but it had also brought me to this, and this was a problem. I wasn't afraid, but I was in a lot of pain, and eventually, I'd break.

Maybe it was best that I crack under the pain and tell the truth. Just because Luke Marsellus had said he wouldn't start a war with Skouras didn't mean he wouldn't fight one if Skouras's men came after Henry. Maybe Marsellus and his men would have these guys for breakfast.

Or maybe Skouras's guys would wipe the floor with Marsellus's security detail and get the baby. Then Henry, or whatever Skouras named him, would grow up rich and well-cared-for, and become a monster like his grandfather. Maybe twenty years from now, in his late forties or early fifties, one of these men would work for Henry, and he'd see Henry so regularly that the sight of his young boss wouldn't remind him anymore of that chick he'd tortured to death for Tony Skouras.