Jessica sat quietly in the front passenger seat of the police cruiser, listening to Tasik’s breathing beside her, refusing to look his way, to let him sense that she was scared. She was indeed scared. The tension in the car reminded her of the night in Linscott Place, when she’d lost grip of every aspect of her police training, every expectation she had been given since joining the force. Your partner will back you. Your cries for assistance will be answered. You’ll always have some notion of what the appropriate action is – rarely will something be so bizarre, so left-field, that you won’t have a trained response in your back pocket. But that night she’d dealt with a flesh-eating being and her partner had abandoned her. Her world had been turned upside down, the rules shattered, her trust dissolved. Now she was back there. She should have been on the side of the man next to her, but she found herself constantly checking on Sneak in her side mirror. The plump, downtrodden prostitute and drug addict looked at home in the back of the cruiser. But there was a calm on her face that defied her situation. It was almost as though she expected what happened next.
On Wilshire, Tasik breezed through the intersection, past a Jamba Juice full of people, instead of turning left towards the West LA police station. Sneak didn’t react. Jessica felt a cold bolt of energy hit her veins. Tasik glanced at her, and she knew.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ Sneak said, giving voice to Jessica’s thoughts.
Tasik glanced at her in the rear-view mirror. They were heading north towards the mountains. Signs for Glendale. He switched on the radio.
‘. . . having difficulty containing the situation due to strained police resources and the sheer number of people descending on Esperance Drive. Police say at least two cars are on fire in the street, and that the owner of the residence in question is a male LAPD officer who is not, at this time, present on the scene. Police choppers have . . .’
Tasik switched off the radio.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll bite. What do you think you know?’
‘I know you killed her,’ Sneak said. Jessica could see Sneak wiggling subtly against the back seat. She could tell the other woman was working her handcuff chain under her buttocks, stretching her shoulder joints to the limits to let the bindings slide down the backs of her thighs to her knees. She’d seen it a thousand times, and Tasik would have noticed it too.
‘I did, did I?’ Tasik said.
‘You got that bad cop stink about you,’ Sneak said. ‘I’ve known a lot of cops in my time. Some of them are good people. Some are wimps with badges who got picked on in high school and want revenge. And every now and then there’s a real predator, and I can see that in you.’
‘Give yourself some credit,’ Tasik said. ‘You’ve got a bit of the old hunter blood in you, too. You’re a scavenger. A liar and a cheater and a thief. But, push comes to shove, you’ve got claws and teeth. I can see that in you. And I saw it in your daughter.’
Jessica put her hand on her gun, but she didn’t draw it. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Needed to wait. To know for sure. To see some physical sign of the danger. Tasik was too comfortable. He eased back in his seat, rolled his window down and put an elbow out. Jessica could feel the rise of the mountain roads under them. He knew these roads, took the corners lazily, the headlights now and then picking out luminescent eyes in the shrubby undergrowth, shining on sheer cliff faces. He was fully relaxed now. Mr Coyote going home to his den on the rocky ridge, where the poison creosote guarded his secret, safe place.
‘It was just like I told Sanchez,’ Tasik gestured to her. ‘I picked Dayly up by chance in a car full of idiot Crips. She hasn’t been living the life like you, Emily. I could see that. She was still a little fresh. High on cheap crack and scared out of her mind. She didn’t know the bag with the guns was there. I pulled her away from the crowd and asked her what the hell she thought she was doing. I was really giving it to her. Maybe I trumped it up a bit, her situation. I told her she was facing jail time, that was a certainty. I told her the type of guns they had in the trunk had been classified as weapons of terrorism, so she was facing thirty years on the inside, minimum. She was crying her eyes out. Panicked. Like a shaky little puppy.’
Sneak now held the wire mesh screen between them, the cuffs stretched between her wrists.
‘I was hoping for a blow job at best,’ Tasik laughed. ‘And then suddenly Dayly started pouring out all this stuff about hidden money and a killer on death row and her junkie mother. I couldn’t follow it at first. It was so crazy. I was shocked, you know? She had to calm down some before she could give it to me straight. She said she knew where millions of dollars was buried. If I helped her out on the gun charges, she would let me in on this thing she had going to dig up the hidden money. I didn’t believe it, but I cut her loose anyway, just to see. Just in case she was onto something, you know? It was worth the gamble. If I came back and it was all just some story, I was going to get my blow job, one way or another.’
‘Was she right?’ Sneak asked. ‘Was the money there?’
‘I sure hope so.’ Tasik smiled. ‘There’s no way she can check this thing out. You know why? Because this Fishwick guy, he says he buried the cash in the late eighties. Back then the place was a big open field with a fence on it and nothing else. Now it’s got – wait for this, this is just classic – a fucking police station on it. Can you believe that? The only way she can find out if he’s lying or not is to dig to the spot, under the station.’
‘And she wanted your help?’ Jessica piped up.
‘Luckily for me, Dayly already had everything set up. She’d sourced a young cop from inside the station to make sure nobody who worked there got wind that someone was tunnelling under the building. Then the two of them got together and recruited this plumber with a rap sheet for digging holes under jewellery stores and casinos, a guy who knows how to make a tunnel and get under a place on the quiet. I’m hearing this and I’m thinking, what the fuck? This girl looks like she’s barely old enough to hold a job, and when I go check out the cop he’s the same. A baby. But that’s it, you see? That’s what I was trying to tell you, Sanchez. These people are born like this. They have criminal minds. Scavenger instincts. They’re built in.’ He tapped his temple.
‘So the two other guys don’t know about you?’ Sneak asked.
‘No,’ Tasik said. ‘It was her fuck-up. My cut was supposed to come out of her end. Dayly tells me that all I have to do is wait for pay day, when the two boys break through to the spot where the cash is supposed to be. Could be tonight, if everything’s still on track.’
‘So what went wrong?’ Sneak asked. ‘It sounds to me as though everything was running like clockwork.’
‘Your greedy-ass daughter went wrong,’ Tasik said. ‘That’s what.’