We were hungry after our nonlunch with Siggy, and we stopped for pizza at the joint he mentioned, in a shopping center on Foothill. We ate Sicilian and drank beer, and Sutter sighed when he finished the last slice, breaking the silence that had enveloped us since we left the pavilion.
“He wasn’t lying about the pizza,” he said.
“Yeah—he’s better than Yelp,” I said. “But how about the rest of his speech? How much of that was bullshit?”
Sutter drank some beer. Food and drink had revived him somewhat, but he still looked weary. “Bluster, maybe, but not bullshit. He’s serious about wanting the girl or the money, and serious about coming after our hides otherwise.”
“I guess that’s not all he’s serious about.”
Sutter squinted at me. “You think?” he said. His voice was bitter. He shook his head. “Sorry. Yeah, Siggy’s got a hair up his ass about me. And if he starts thinking I’ve made him look bad in front of his guys—made him look weak—it’s only going to get worse.” He finished his beer and set the bottle carefully on the table. “Got a cure for that? A hair extraction procedure?”
I shook my head. “Cash might work. Lots of people swear by its soothing relief.”
He smiled. “We can hope.”
“The problem is, we’re not going to get anything out of the Brays in three days’ time—if we get anything from them at all.”
Sutter shook his head. “How’re you fixed for cash?”
I watched the traffic on Foothill, which passed in an endless, hypnotic stream and fluttered in waves of heat from the pavement. I sighed. “I’ve got what I put aside for a down payment on the building. It’s a little over a hundred grand.”
Sutter nodded slowly. “If things work out, you can take it out of what we get from the Brays.”
“And if they don’t work out?”
He shrugged. “Mi sofá es tu sofá.”
The clinic was closed when I returned, buttoned up and dark. I felt guilty about running out at midday, but grateful that I had to face neither patients nor Lydia. I climbed the stairs, kicked off my shoes, and lay on the bed; I was drifting into sleep when my phone chirped.
“Tomorrow night’s good,” Anne Crane said. Her voice was clipped and tired, and there were other voices in the background. “My video guy will be here, and I have a conference room booked for eight o’clock, and a stenographer.”
“Thanks, Anne. I appreciate it.”
“Just be here at eight with…whoever,” she said, “and don’t forget—you’re supposed to send me notes.” And then she was gone.
Along with any chance of sleep. I sighed and cranked up my Mac, and spent forty-five minutes drinking coffee and typing three pages of bullet points that I e-mailed to Anne. Then I grabbed my car keys.
Jiffy-Lab was a twenty-four-hour drug, STD, and DNA testing lab in a Koreatown strip mall, wedged between a martial arts studio and a UPS store. And Nate Rash, who worked there, owed me for restarting his sister’s heart when she stopped it with heroin. It was past eight on Tuesday night when I parked my Honda out front. The UPS was dark, and the sensei was locking his dojo, but the gruesome fluorescents were still lit at Jiffy-Lab. I killed my engine, and Nate climbed into the passenger seat.
He was red-haired and gangly, with a patchy beard and piercings in his nose and both ears. His purple scrubs were wrinkled and dotted with what I hoped were food stains.
Nate eyed the plastic zip bags in my hand. His voice was soft and reedy. “Those for me?”
I nodded. “Two buccal samples. A is a woman, B is a male child.”
He took the bags. “Mother and son?”
“That’s what you’re going to tell me.”
“I guess you’re not worried about chain of custody.”
“We’ll get to that later, depending on what you say. How long?”
He shrugged. “A couple days.”
“Sooner would be better.”
“Getting paid wouldn’t suck either,” he said, and climbed from the car.
The parking lot was quiet, and I sat there for a while, my hands at twelve o’clock on the steering wheel, my forehead on my hands. The air in the Honda was stale, and smelled of exhaustion and fear—chronic conditions of late. I’d been driving with one eye on my rearview mirror for days now, jumping at shadows, and searching passing faces for ones I’d seen too many times before. Worse still, I was getting tired of looking over my shoulder—too tired to take care. That, I knew, was when bad things—lethal things—could happen. I thought about turning the key in the ignition, but my hands were suddenly like someone else’s hands, and my arms felt like lead. The smart move was to head home, bar the doors, raise the drawbridge, and pull the covers over my head, but the thought of the empty apartment in the empty building—the dark clinic like a cave below, the echo of my footsteps on the stairs, and the silence afterward—turned my chest icy.
There was a rap on the car window and I bolted up. It was a woman, worried-looking, with one earbud plugged in and the other dangling near her clavicle. I ran the window down.
“You okay?” she asked. “You looked like you passed out or something. Or like you were crying.”
“I’m all right,” I said, and the woman nodded. I watched her climb into an ancient Volvo, and watched the car dissolve into the blur of headlights on Third Street. Passed out or crying—that seemed to cover the range of my options just then.