Sneak was awakened by the clinking of my teaspoon in my coffee cup. She sat up on the couch and looked at me standing at the counter.
‘So, that was not a San Marino 13s guy I saw walking out of here at sunrise,’ she concluded.
‘It wasn’t?’ I suppressed a smile.
‘No, because you’d be dead if it was.’
‘I see.’
‘Unless he wasn’t here to kill you. Unless he was here for something else.’ She watched me carefully. I focused on my coffee.
‘Huh! I thought I smelled burning pubic hair.’ Sneak shook her head. ‘What the hell are you thinking, mixing with those guys? You can’t lick those tattoos off. Don’t let them tell you any different.’
‘I’m not mixing with them, Mother Teresa. I slept with one,’ I said. ‘It’s not going to be a regular thing. It was an accident.’
‘No it wasn’t. You know how I know? Because of the gopher palace. Look at that thing.’ She gestured to the tank by the window. ‘It looks like Disneyland. You didn’t buy that. That’s what a guy brings a woman with a gopher so he can make friends with her beaver.’
Sneak waited for me to defend myself. I sipped my coffee instead. The simple fact was that the hours after Alejandro had arrived at my door had been indefensibly good, a selfish, devilish indulgence I couldn’t possibly justify rationally. It had been something I couldn’t connect to the real world, to legal or emotional or physical consequences, to predictions of it happening or not happening again.
There was a knock at the door. Quincy. His apparently alcoholic mother was waiting for him at the kerb, the engine running, the woman leaning forwards over the wheel to eye me curiously. Obviously the child had decided that she could wait – nothing was more important than performance and chocolate. Sneak sat on the couch with her arms folded, decidedly miffed at my behaviour.
‘Can you play “Desperado” by the Eagles?’ I asked Quincy wistfully.
‘How ’bout “You’re No Good” by Linda Ronstadt?’ Sneak asked.
‘I’ve never heard of either of those songs,’ Quincy said. His mother beeped the horn.
‘Just take a chocolate, honey. Your mom’s waiting.’ I offered the box. My phone rang as Quincy bolted away across the lawn to the waiting car.
‘You need to drop that cop. Sanchez,’ Ada barked down the line.
‘Everybody’s lecturing me this morning.’ I set my coffee down. ‘I’m going to go back to bed in a minute, if you’re not careful.’
‘I don’t lecture,’ Ada said. ‘I don’t “ask” or “advise” people to do things. People do the shit I tell them to do or they get a squeezin’.’
I didn’t need to ask what Ada’s idea of ‘a squeezin” was. I assumed it meant having body parts chopped off, bones broken or significant parts of oneself submerged in desert sand, perhaps permanently.
‘Sanchez rubs me the wrong way, so you’re gonna get rid of her.’
‘You rub her the wrong way, too,’ I remarked. ‘Just in case you were curious.’
‘I wasn’t.’
I put Ada on speaker and told her what Jessica had told me about Marcus Lemon, my car, Dayly’s bank and phone accounts, Tasik’s concern about the Crips gang. Sneak sat watching me, listening, from the couch.
‘What does a woman sell for eight hundred bucks?’ Ada mused. ‘To someone who doesn’t want to be traced. You should ask the flabby ho-bag you’ve got crashing on your couch. She’d know.’
‘You’re on speaker,’ I said.
‘Hey, skanky ho-bag!’ Ada said, louder. ‘What does a person get from a dirty chicken-header in your gene pool for eight hundred clams?’
‘I don’t know, why don’t we ask your daddy what he paid last time I stuck my thumb up his ass?’ Sneak snapped.
I hung up before Ada could reply, and grabbed the keys to the Gangstermobile.
The I-110 highway. Homeless camps, factories spewing steam into the yellow sky, the desert and the scrubby brown mountains beyond. I watched billboards for casinos on the way to Palm Springs. Neil Diamond in silver sequins. Rod Stewart’s blazing white teeth poking out from his turmeric orange face.
‘San Francisco,’ I said.
‘Hmm,’ Sneak agreed, taking a hit of cocaine or the like from her handbag then dumping the bag on the floor.
‘What can you do within three hours of San Francisco airport?’
‘Three hours is not what we’re looking at,’ Sneak said, checking her face in the mirror. ‘If she was there for six hours total, she’d only have been able to stop for a few minutes wherever she got to three hours away. So, what – she drives three hours, spends two minutes picking up a lobster roll and hightails it back?’
‘Maybe not a lobster roll,’ I said. ‘But maybe she picked up something else. Something that could only be collected in person, by her, and then turned around. Maybe it was something someone paid her eight hundred dollars to go get.’
‘It’s just as likely she went somewhere an hour away from the airport, stayed for four hours and then drove back.’
‘Okay,’ I sighed. ‘I’m just trying to—’
‘That’s not accounting for traffic on the highways, or foot traffic in the airport. Plane delays on the tarmac.’
‘You can stop now,’ I said.
‘I saw a psychic last night,’ Sneak announced.
‘A psychic? Like a medium?’
‘I’ve known her for a long time. She helped cleanse me after the demon stole my roommate’s body. We did a sage ritual.’
I quietly considered Sneak’s ultra-logical dismissal of my San Francisco time theory next to these new pieces of information and chose to say nothing.
‘She said Dayly’s under the ground. Deep under the ground. Where it’s dark.’
‘Well, I place about as much stock in that as I do in your roommate’s demon problem, Sneak,’ I said. ‘But if she’s right, she might have been seeing Dayly in New York catching the subway. That’s deep underground and dark.’
‘Hmm,’ Sneak said again.
‘Underground parking lot. Someone’s wine cellar. Basement. Storage unit. Dodger Stadium has tunnels underground.’
‘Shut up,’ Sneak sighed. I watched her for a moment, then jerked the wheel and took an exit off the highway.
‘What are we doing now? Don’t give me another pep talk. I’ll smack you the fuck out.’
I took the off-ramp under the overpass.
‘Al Tasik was watching my apartment last night. If he’s following us now I want to lose him,’ I said. I popped my door. ‘Swap with me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re the street girl,’ I said. ‘I’m the Brentwood bitch. You’ll know how to shake a tail much better than me.’
Sneak got into the driver’s seat. A small smile crossed her lips. I was expecting her to have some fun winding around the streets, but she slammed her foot down on the accelerator and sailed through the red-lit intersection, causing a pick-up truck to veer dangerously close to the bridge pylon. She was heading for a field of warehouses, dusty dirt roads between huge steel walls, that stretched as far as the eye could see. Sneak blindly swung the car down an alleyway between the warehouses and I shuffled up in my chair, grabbing my seat belt.
‘Jesus, Sneak! There could be people in here!’
‘Well, they better get out of my way,’ she said, flooring it. The dust cloud behind us lifted and swirled as we cut wildly between the warehouses, ramming the car sideways into turns, grinding in the dirt. Sneak started laughing and wailing after a while and, despite myself, I joined in. We passed a storage facility auction, where groups of men and women stood bidding on the contents of a row of units yawning open in the blazing sun. I caught a glimpse of old furniture, tubs of toys spilling out over stripped-down motorcycle bodies and stacked boxes. Hands raised to bid. We covered the crowd in dust as we sped past. Sneak was laughing her head off, tears running from her eyes.
The San Chinto police station had art deco leanings, might once have been a pizza restaurant when prospects for a bigger population out here were imagined. It was beige, surrounded by bushes, and set on the corner of a block between squat, neat houses. Sneak parked a block down from the station and we swapped positions again, sat watching the police station as though expecting Officer Marcus Lemon to emerge and head directly for us to submit to an interview.
‘I don’t think we should go in,’ I said. ‘Not in the least because we can’t legally be seen together. But they’ll also have cameras. Jessica thinks whoever’s after Dayly might have broken into my apartment because I made myself known when I went in to report my car stolen.’
‘We don’t have to go into the station to find out if he’s there,’ Sneak said, drawing her phone out of her handbag. ‘That’s amateur hour.’
She googled a number, dialled and waited. I sat beside her and watched. When she spoke it was with an old crone’s voice, high and gravelly and dry-throated, a voice so convincing I was struck dumb at the sound of it.
‘Hello? I’m calling with the intention of contacting my grandson, Marcus,’ Sneak croaked. ‘Lemon is the name, Officer Marcus Lemon . . . I’m calling because the young man in question is supposed to pick me up this evening at my home to take me to a dance class at the local hall, six o’clock sharp. I’d like to know if he’s still coming . . . What’s that? You’ll have to speak up . . . Well, I didn’t suppose in the first instance that a man would be allowed to have his personal cellular phone on him while serving and protecting the community . . . My, my, yes, I’ll do just that.’
She hung up.
‘He’s not in there,’ she said. ‘He’s out on patrol.’
‘That was simply amazing,’ I said.
‘I do the sex hotline in winter when it’s cold out,’ Sneak explained. ‘The old-lady voice is quite popular. I can also do innocent schoolgirl. Horny single mom. Lonely female trucker. The president’s bored secretary left all alone in the Oval Office while the prez is out on the campaign trail.’
‘Jesus, that last one is a rather elaborate fantasy. Why does she have to be the president’s secretary in particular?’
‘So she can do stuff to herself on the president’s desk while portraits of important historical guys watch on.’
‘Okay,’ I said regretfully.
‘You asked.’
‘Well, I wish the performance just now could have helped us find Lemon. We know he’s not here. But he could be anywhere.’
‘This will help us find him,’ Sneak said. She bent and pulled a heavy grey radio unit out of her handbag and heaved it onto the dashboard. She plugged it into the car’s cigarette lighter socket and flipped it on.
‘A police radio scanner?’
‘You thought I was out all night getting high, suckin’ dicks, stocking up on energy pills? That was the night before, Neighbour. Last night I got this, and a few other useful bits and pieces.’
We sat and listened to radio calls coming through. It was warm in the car, getting warmer. Desert heat carried between the mountains on a heavy breeze. The voices were too old or too female to be Lemon for the first twenty minutes.
‘How are we going to know when it’s him?’ I wondered aloud. ‘They’re all reporting car numbers, not their names or badge numbers.’
‘Here’s a contender,’ Sneak said, holding up a hand to silence me as a young male voice came on the line.
‘Dispatch, this is L81, I’m stopping for a possible 11-25 on Wilson and Harlow. No assistance needed. Over.’
‘Copy that, L81. And did your grandma get on to you? Over.’
‘My grandma? Over.’
‘That’s our boy.’ Sneak smiled.
On the corner of Wilson and Harlow Streets, not far from the San Chinto surf shop, a large pane of glass had slid from its holdings on the side of a truck and shattered on the road. Sneak and I watched from a distance as Officer Lemon put out road hazard cones that he extracted from the trunk of his cruiser.
‘He certainly looks like the guy from the video,’ Sneak said.
‘So what’s our play here?’ I asked. ‘One of us just goes up and starts questioning him?’
‘I don’t know about that. I mean, all he’s got to say is, “We were dating. She dumped me and moved to Alaska,” and where do we go from there?’
‘He doesn’t even have to say that,’ I reasoned. ‘He could just say “Fuck off” and we’re in the same position. We’ve got to get this right, because the moment we let him know we’re snooping around, we’ve played our hand. We have to know that if we speak to him, he’ll talk.’
‘We don’t have anything on him to make him do that,’ Sneak said.
‘Well, I’m not putting him in a hole in the desert, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
Sneak tapped the door of the car, a rhythmic strumming. Lemon was standing in the middle of the sunbaked road, adjacent to his cruiser, lazily directing traffic.
‘Look at that ass,’ Sneak said suddenly.
I frowned. ‘Are you checking out your daughter’s possible boyfriend or killer right now?’
‘Look at his ass, though,’ she said. ‘Those pants are tight. I don’t see the outline of a cell phone in that back pocket.’
‘So?’
‘So if the phone’s not on his body, it’s in the car.’ We watched Lemon for a while before Sneak unclipped her seatbelt.
‘All right, here’s the play,’ she said. ‘You pull out, drive past him slowly, drift over and ram the front of the car into that traffic light.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t ram it hard. Just bunt it. Enough to cause a distraction. The front’s already scratched up from me busting into that hangar.’ She was pulling wads of tissues from a packet in her purse. ‘You ever faked a car crash before? Bite down on these as you make impact but try to let the rest of your body go limp. A good bump can rattle a tooth out real easy at your age.’
‘I’m only a few years older than you!’
‘Get out and make a scene if you can. Maybe cry. Yes, definitely cry.’
‘This is—’
‘Just do it.’ She got out and I watched her walk to the surf shop and browse the windows, only feet from Lemon’s car. Seconds ticked by in which I waited for her to return to the vehicle and admit that her idea was ridiculous. She turned around and looked at me, raised her eyebrows. I shook my head. She made a menacing fist.
‘I’m the best friend in the world,’ I told myself aloud, pulling my seatbelt tight across my chest. ‘I’m the best possible friend a person could have.’
I pulled out into the street, slowed by the hazard-cone ring Lemon had made in the right-hand lane. I made eye contact with the young man so that he would know I was gawking at the scene. In the rear-view mirror, I saw Sneak push off the surf shop window, heading for the cruiser.
The car behind me beeped at my slowness as I passed the glass crash zone. The perfect form of encouragement. I stuffed the wad of tissues into my mouth, bit down and hit the accelerator as I aimed for the traffic light pole.
A whump, dull and heavy in my centre mass, like a punch to the sternum. The air left me and I doubled over, slamming my head into my arms, which I managed to cross over the steering wheel at the last second. The car had hopped the kerb unevenly, the left-side tyres still on the road. I flopped into the passenger seat and spat out the napkins.
Shrill, all-consuming pain hit me. It was both my tensed muscles spasming, grinding bones and joints, and awakening sleeping, rarely used muscles, but also a mental flash of myself as Adrian Orlov, the bullet I had fired at the man slamming into his middle, folding him in half, sprawling him on the hard floor of his home.
I righted myself, grabbed the radio from the dashboard and threw it into the passenger-side footwell, dragging Sneak’s jacket over the top of it. I kicked open the door of the car and slid out. Marcus Lemon was on me immediately, his hands under my arms, guiding me back into the driver’s seat.
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ he said. ‘Try to take it easy, ma’am.’
I burst into loud, hysterical tears.
‘Oh my god! Oh my god!’ I wailed. ‘I hit something. I hit someone! Someone call nine-one-one!’ I folded my arms and leaned on the horn, buried my face in my arms.
‘It’s okay,’ Lemon laughed, easing me off the horn. ‘I’m a police officer. You’ve barely dented your front bumper. Sit there and take a load off while I call this in to dispatch. How’s your neck?’ There were people gathering behind him, staring worriedly at me. ‘You’re fine, ma’am. There’s no need to cry.’
The scene I had caused was working, apparently. Cars were slowing on the other side of the street to take in both accident sites. People were exiting shops and gathering on corners of the intersection. As Lemon radioed his station for backup, I watched a baby-blue Porsche Cayenne cruise by, the elbow of a leather jacket hanging from the driver’s window.
Fred and Mike. Ada’s men. They stared impassively at me as they rolled by. I shook my head. What were the chances? I told myself the shock of the crash, and my nerves at making it happen, were playing with my mind.
I sat back and looked in the rear-view mirror. Sneak was nowhere to be seen.