Engo settled in the recliner, his hands gripping the leather arms, danger dancing in his pupils. “What do you know, smart little cookie?” he asked.
“You, Matt, Ben, maybe Jakey as well; you’re all crooked,” Andy said.
Engo licked a canine tooth. Andy waited, holding his gaze.
“That so?”
“Yeah. You’re crooked as a bucket of fishhooks,” she went on, shifting carefully to the edge of the milk crate. She painted on her best eager, mischievous gaze. “Matt tried to nail me at the barbecue on Saturday about walking into that goddamn palace that he owns and not wondering what happened to Ben. I’m surprised I said anything at all. I was speechless. Property records say Matt bought that place two years ago. You have any idea what it’s worth?”
“You searched Matt’s property records?”
“Even if he got a solid-gold handshake for what he did on 9/11, they sure as hell didn’t make the guy a millionaire for it,” Andy went on. “His people are firefighters from Rhode Island going back a century. Where does the money come from? And then there’s Jake. I had an eye on his phone all that afternoon. He blew six grand on online poker while we were chewing on those steaks.”
Engo leaned forward in the recliner. They were almost knee-to-knee, and with that easy, casual shift in position, Andy knew she was now within grabbing distance. She was sure there was a weapon down the side of the recliner, in the built-in remote and magazine pocket. There had to be. She just hoped it was a whomping stick and not a knife or a gun.
“Then there’s you.” Andy jutted her chin, but didn’t take her eyes off Engo’s. “You pretend you survive on chicken shit living out here in this trailer and moonlighting as a building super. You cut your own hair and dress like you fell into a dumpster behind a thrift shop, but you own the building out there. Property records show that, too. Every apartment, top to bottom. You got to have at least three studios here that are just fuck pads for Craigslist hookers, right? You can tell from the boarded-up windows. Those girls would be throwing you cash kickbacks. Then there’s the alley behind us, which is perfect for re-ups for the gangbangers renting the bottom floors. You could launder hundreds of thousands of dollars through this building in a year if you were smart enough.”
Engo didn’t speak. Andy was talking so hard, she was running out of air. She took a moment to suck in a lungful, heard it tremble with barely contained nerve as she spoke again.
“It’s the fires,” she said.
Engo’s right hand crept up the arm of the chair.
“The insurance fires,” she continued.
Engo paused.
Andy nodded, her chin up, defiant.
“At the school yesterday,” she said, “the same fire where you and Matt decided to run your little ‘test’ on Ben and me. That place reeked of gasoline. It was clearly a deliberately lit fire. And yet, Matt didn’t close off the scene.”
“Excuse me?” Engo frowned.
“I could smell the gas. So could you. I know you could. You gotta close down a scene when you suspect there’s been arson. You don’t go back in for cleanup! Everybody knows that. You gotta leave it for the cops. But Matt didn’t preserve that scene. And I know why. It’s because he wanted to get me out of the way. He sent me upstairs with you so you could babysit me, while he sent Jake back to the ignition point to make sure there was no evidence of the accelerant left over. Matt wanted to make absolutely certain the arson was covered up.”
“And why the hell would he want that?” Engo was grinning.
“Because he’s in on it!” Andy hissed. “You’re all in on it!”
Engo rocked back in his recliner. He held his belly as he laughed.
“Wait-wait-wait. So you think we hook up with members of the public,” he said, cackling, “and we cook up insurance fires?”
“That school,” Andy said. “You got any idea what that’s worth?”
“You’ve— You’ve had—” Engo sucked in a breath, hacked more laughs before he could go on. “Oh, man. Andy. Andy. Honey. You’ve had such fun on that property records website, haven’t you?”
“This is what you do,” she insisted, edging closer, trying to convince him. “I know it. You hit maybe three, four big targets a year. You find jobs where you know the fire is deliberately lit, and you heavy the member of the public for a cut of the payout. You split the money in exchange for making sure the scene is clean of evidence.”
Engo kept laughing. Andy bit her tongue.
“I’m trying to tell you, Engo, that I know what you all are up to. And I want in.”
“You want ‘in,’ huh?”
“I do. Because I have something to offer. I’m crooked, too.”
“Oh, I can’t wait for this.”
“My boss.” Andy was trembling all over. The apparent bravery she’d had to muster to present Engo with what she knew was slipping away. “Back in San Diego. I know that Matt told you what he did to me.”
“Uh-huh.” Engo wiped his eyes. “He slipped you a Mickey and an unwanted good-night cuddle. So what?”
“So he’d been waiting for his shot,” Andy said. “That’s why it took so long. Four years, and all he could do was make passes. Sleaze onto me. Hope I’d give in. But when I tripped up on the job, and he finally had something to hold over me? That’s when he decided to strike. He thought I’d never report him for raping me. He thought I’d be too scared that he would reveal what he knew about me.”
“What did he know?” Engo asked.
“I took cash from a burn site,” Andy said. “A meth lab blew up, right in Five Points. During the cleanup there was a bag of cash left over in an unburned room. The cops were there on the scene already. The fire was out. I was part of a team just doing grunt work for San Diego PD. We were moving evidence for the cops from the second-floor apartment down onto the street. I had to walk down a long, empty hallway with two plastic grocery bags full of cash in my hands.”
Engo smiled. His eyes shone as he listened.
“So I took a stack. It was just under seven grand.” Andy eased a rattling breath. “I didn’t realize I was on camera. My boss got the footage. He didn’t tell me about it, didn’t tell anyone. But then, the night of the party, when he … when he … when he did what he did … he said he’d hand the video in to police if I ever told anyone.”
“This is what you were trying to tell me.” Engo nodded. “At the school. You said there was more. There was stuff Matt didn’t know.”
“Right.”
“Jesus, this is amazing.”
“I want into your crew.” Andy rose to her full height. “Next insurance fire. I want to help cover it up. I want a cut.”
“Or what?” Engo said.
“Or—”
He lunged at her. Engo was out of the chair so fast Andy felt the whole trailer rock around her like a boat hit by an unexpected wave before she realized she’d been snatched out of the chair. She was pinned against the flimsy timber-veneer wall. Engo had one of her hands trapped above her, his knee between her legs, a hip driving into her pelvis, leaning all his weight into her. The three-fingered hand gripped her windpipe like a claw.
“Clever little cookie,” Engo breathed into her mouth. She tasted stomach acid. “Tell me. Tell me. Or else what, Andy? I want to hear it.”
Andy drew the pliers she’d brought with her out of the pocket at the front of her hoodie. She swung them up and used them to bite into the soft flesh under Engo’s biceps, gripping an inch of skin and T-shirt in the teeth of the device. He instantly let go of her throat and arm, the pain jolting him, drawing a deep gasp from his chest. Andy used the surprise to shove him backward onto the floor in front of the door. She kept her grip, squeezed hard on the pliers, all of her cold mental focus driven into pinning his free arm under her knee and sitting high enough on his chest so that he couldn’t flip her off. She was instantly panting, covered in sweat, the two-second-long maneuver she’d been mentally rehearsing for several hours now complete.
“I had a lot of fun on some other websites, too,” Andy said. “Am I getting this right? This is the brachii muscle in the triceps. Have I got it? Does it hurt?”
Andy twisted the pliers. Engo screamed.
“They teach you this one in ninja school, bitch?”
“Get off me! Get off me! Pleeeeaaase, urgh get off me!”
“Who’s screaming now, little piggy?” Andy twisted and tugged. “Huh? Huh? Who’s screaming now?”
Engo howled.
“You’re gonna tell Matt to put me on the crew.” Andy had to yell above Engo’s cries. “Or I’ll come back here and give your inbred ass something to really scream about. You understand?”
Andy got off him. Engo curled into a ball, his arm cradled against his chest. She resisted the urge to kick him in the spine before she let herself out the door.