I shoved Ellen into the passenger side of the car and slammed the door shut, guillotining a handful of pink feathers. I crawled into the driver’s side and locked the door, but I didn’t start the ignition. We weren’t going anywhere until we had a little chat, Ellen and me.
She was crying again, this time for real—her fake eyelashes were starting to wilt and slide toward her cheeks. With the light from the streetlamp overhead, I could see two pink poufy feathers clinging to her lip gloss. Nineteen grand. The plan I’d worked out with Jackal. Even whatever future life she’d planned for herself. She’d done so much to put all of that in danger, for nothing. For Hiram fucking Klein.
“So,” I said, conversationally, staring straight ahead out of my windshield. Counting to ten in my head, then twenty, the word motherfuckermotherfucker chasing its tail in my brain. “How long have you been fucking Joel, too?”
“How did you . . . How did you find me?” A feather quivered on her lip.
“We might make an actress of you yet,” I said. “That was quite the scene you made back there. Quite the scene.”
“Do you . . .” Ellen’s eyes darted out the window, and I think it occurred to her for the first time how pissed I was, how much trouble she might be in. She licked her lips. “Do you have a tracker on my phone?”
“Please. You didn’t make it difficult.”
Ellen squished herself into the corner of the car, pressing a small glittery clutch into her chest like it would be some protection against me. As if I’d come there to hurt her.
“This is all so easy for you,” she said. Her tears had slicked muddy glitter down her cheeks. “But for me, it’s like . . . it’s like . . .”
Outside, another whooping burst of laughter, the crystal clink of a bottle smashed on marble. I wondered if Junior had heard. I wondered if he would tell his father, what he would say.
I studied her face again. Beneath the tears and the emotions, she was clear, coherent. She wasn’t that drunk. There was something else bothering her. I tried to think of what Lou would do, or say, in the moment. A million years ago, she’d been kind to me in a diner. I tried to remember how to be kind. “What, Ellen? What’s it like?”
“It’s like it’s getting harder to remember that it’s all fake,” Ellen said, turning her nose against my glass window. “It’s getting harder to remember that this isn’t really me. I find myself doing things, feeling things, and it’s like, who the hell am I? I don’t care about this man. I don’t care about this shit. But it’s like I can’t stop myself.” She stole a glance at my face and sighed. “I know you don’t get it. And I’m not fucking Joel. I was trying to . . .” She trailed off.
I felt a little sting in my chest and didn’t want to name it. So it wasn’t easy, her job. She wasn’t doing it out of any good passion. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to let Klein jerk her around, not on my watch, not on the Lady’s paycheck. I ground my teeth. If Junior hadn’t heard—or if he was the kind of ne’er-do-well who didn’t want to rock the boat in case it affected his paycheck—then it was possible nothing irreparable had happened. Just possible. But it had been a close call, too close a call. I reached into the back seat of my car, pulled out a flask full of whiskey I’d stashed for an emergency. Ellen flinched, her eyes darker than I’d ever seen them in her very pale face. Afraid, like I might throw the flask at her.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t waste booze.” I turned in my seat so that our knees were almost touching. I leaned forward and held out the flask until she took it. “It’ll make you feel better.”
As I watched Ellen take long, deep swigs from my flask, I realized I didn’t need Lou there to tell me the thing I was now sure of: I’d let Ellen go too long. She’d lost herself, she’d lost sight of the end goal, and now I was going to lose something, too. Except that wasn’t the way I ever played this game. I didn’t lose, not anymore.
Six months before, I might’ve convinced myself to go to Lou, admit to her and the Lady that I’d fucked up and we needed to find a new girl. That either the mark would take a lot longer than we expected or the case was dead, too compromised. Let Ellen off the hook. But now there was nineteen grand on the line and not only my debt this time, but the money for the police, too. That mattered to all of us, Lou and Jackal and me. To our little blackmail family, such as it was. And it wasn’t an option when I’d found such an easy out, poetic justice practically, to fix it.
No. I couldn’t let up on her now.
“Feel better?”
Ellen nodded, her chin wobbling. She gave me a weak smile, her eyes still watery.
I took a deep breath. This is what the Lady pays you for, Jo. “Okay, let me see if I can guess what happened tonight. You got invited to a party by the mark’s son. You thought you’d go, hoping Klein would be there, he’d get jealous. Not bothering to tell me, I might add, despite the fact that the dead flamingo you’re wearing was bought with my money. Then—surprise!—Klein didn’t give a shit, and you got sloppy on two sips of champagne, made a goddamn spectacle of yourself. That about sum it up?”
Ellen slumped in the passenger’s seat, curling her legs up underneath her. Making herself as small as she could. Her face looked puffy and a little raw from the tears. I was careful to keep mine as blank and bored as I could. I told myself that hers was the sort of crying I recognized, an actress’s tears: conscious of the effect you’re making; check the mirror a few times when you’re home alone, to make sure you know what pretty vulnerability looks like on your face. Bright, brimming eyes: check. Swollen lips: oh, sure. Color in your cheeks but no snot running: perfect. And then think to yourself, Yep, heartbreak, nailed it. I told myself she was a better actress than I’d realized. I told myself she knew exactly what she was doing.
“Please,” Ellen whispered. Her hands were clenched and red. “I don’t know how to do this anymore. Sometimes it even feels like I . . . like I maybe even love him. Why does it feel like that?”
Dopamine. The thrill of a new adventure. Bourbon. Take your pick. “Maybe I love this whiskey,” I said, gesturing at the flask. “You see what I’m saying?”
Ellen’s nose twitched and she sniffled. “But he’s not whiskey. He’s a person. Have you ever even been in love?”
Oink, I almost said to her. Instead, I tried to catch my temper on its way out and failed. “It is a job. He is a job. Listen, love is a thing men invented as a convenient excuse when they’re done fucking women they can’t stand. Sorry, toots, no more hide-the-salami, can’t help it, don’t love you anymore. Not my fault. You see? Jesus Christ.”
“Do you have to be so goddamn ugly,” she said, bouncing the flask against the dashboard where it tumbled to her feet. But I could see it was the last of her fire, one last flash in the pan.
I kept on it.
“You know where he is right now? He’s fucking some new blonde, or a brunette, or both. But don’t worry, he’s not going to leave his wife for any of them, either. They never leave their wives, Ellen. That’s not just a lesson for this case, that’s a good lesson for you to remember. If he tells you he doesn’t want you but still fucks you anyway, don’t ever forget: he never lied to you. You are letting him treat you like this, Ellen. That’s the truth.”
She was crying soundlessly, mouth open in a wet red O. Staring straight out the window, her nose practically pressed against it. The kill shot was close. I could sense it.
“The whole production knows about the two of you. He’s screwing everything with tits, but they all know about you. How would they know, Ellen, unless you’ve been making yourself a spectacle over him? Pathetic.” I shook my head. She was crying so hard she was trembling, each sob rocking her back and forth slightly on the seat. “You have him right where you want him if you can be strong for me for a few more days,” I said, and I reached out and threaded my fingers through hers. She jerked away from me, but I was stronger and I held her tight when I said: “Make him pay, Ellen. We’re so close. Get back some dignity and make. Him. Pay.”
She didn’t look up as I turned the engine over, started to pull out of the cemetery and head back toward her apartment. She didn’t move at all.
I didn’t look at her again until I pulled up to her curb, and then I scanned her crumpled face. Her feet were curled under her like a little girl’s, and she clutched herself around the middle, like she was trying to keep herself together. Pink feathers on the seat, the car’s floor, her face. “Thursday,” I said, and we both knew it was a threat I meant to keep.
Ellen sobbed for a moment or two, her jaw mawing at the air like a gulping goldfish. Then, in the tiniest voice: “I’ll be there.” She didn’t look up as she clicked the car door open and climbed out. I knew she meant it. Thursday, she’d be my girl, and it would run smoothly, exactly the way it should have from the start.
Thursday would be fine. I just didn’t know what would be left of her on Friday.
Olvera Street at night glinted with candy-colored Día de los Muertos flags, even weeks after the holiday. Mariachi strummed guitars at the mouths of different restaurants, while a host of people chattered over meals of varying levels of authenticity. Cielito Lindo was located at the front of the street, a small cultural wedge of the oldest part of the city, between Little Tokyo and Chinatown.
By the time I got there, the taquito stand was closed for the night, all boarded up.
I found Lou in the third bar I tried, a little wrought iron joint with a reddish glow and eight-dollar pitchers of margaritas. She had her back to me, slumped over a tumbler, the scarlet tint of the lighting catching the slinky satin sheen of her cocktail dress. She stiffened when she caught sight of me from the corner of her eye.
“Hey.” I slid into the empty seat next to her. A nearly full glass of amber on the bar in front of her. She didn’t look at me.
“I’ve never been stood up before.”
“I’m here now, aren’t I?” I was too tired, the ghost of Ellen still too near, to soften my tone. Lou had taken maybe two sips of her bourbon. I wasn’t sure what was worse: that she wasn’t drinking it, or that she’d ordered bourbon at a margarita joint. “So I didn’t stand you up if I showed.”
“Not once, never even with a mark. Never even before.”
As a rule, Lou did not talk about her life before the Lady Upstairs. I knew what I knew, which was more than Jackal did, but it still wasn’t much. She didn’t share the details with anyone, not even the Lady, I was sure. It thawed me a little, that Lou was sharing something with me she wouldn’t tell the Lady. I touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I should’ve called. I got stuck in traffic.”
Lou was wearing a little scrub of makeup—darkened lashes, lipstick glossy and reddish. If she knew I was lying, she didn’t show it. She stared sullenly at her glass. Finally, she said: “So what is it, you don’t want to spend time with me or you don’t want to work Carrigan?”
“Neither. I’m sorry, I lost track of time—” That old saw. I heard Jackal’s excuses in the office as soon as I said it and bit down on my tongue. Lou stared straight ahead, unwavering. She might’ve been straining to read the tequila labels on the amber-tinted bottles behind the bar for all the attention she paid me. I decided on something that was a close cousin to the truth. “Okay. Fine. The truth is, I am worried about Carrigan. He’s too rich, Lou. He’s too connected. There’s too many ways for it to go bad.”
“You don’t think you can do it.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time we got in over our heads together.”
It wasn’t something I liked to dwell on, what had happened after my pie diner breakfast with Lou. I didn’t regret it—I couldn’t allow myself to regret anything that had turned me from that woman into Jo, that had brought Lou and even Jackal into my life. But it wasn’t a pretty chapter, what had come between apple cheddar and my first successful case, weeks later.
Lou turned on the stool toward me. She blew out her cheeks in a big puff, eyebrows skyrocketing. “Do you blame me for that?”
“I blame us both.” I signaled the bartender for a drink, whatever was closest, any damn drink he wanted to pour. Behind Lou, a couple moved to the bar next to us. He put his hand on the small of her back and she stepped away. Not a good sign for the date, but still: I’d rather have been him than me at that moment.
Lou didn’t say anything. She took, finally, a small sip of her drink and said, under her breath, “Shit whiskey.” Wondering, I was pretty sure, if my cold feet about Carrigan weren’t payback for the way things had gone bad all those years ago.
“Forget it,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said anything. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t really anybody’s fault.”
“If you say so.”
It wasn’t that Carrigan was so similar to the Asshole. They didn’t look much alike, except in that way older white men who paid taxes above a certain bracket all looked a little alike—the style of clothes, the haircut, the cash even men needed to keep up the goods. He hadn’t been a lawyer, but he’d—we’d—worked in an office a few blocks from Carrigan’s. That was pretty much the extent of the similarities, on the face of it.
But that first one had gone so badly, so quickly. With even fewer red flags than Carrigan.
After our pie breakfast, Lou had taken me back to her apartment, to shower and change. I had three weeks left on my lease and was getting desperate enough to consider calling my mother, asking her to send me money for a ticket home or a loan—I hadn’t worked out the details yet. I was trying not to think about it. When I thought about it, I imagined her soft exhalation into the phone, a mix of relief and condescending care. Oh, honey, I knew it. Come home. Let me take care of you.
At that moment, Lou had seemed like a godsend, a temporary balm against everything that had flipped upside down in my world in the last month.
Especially when she’d come to me after the shower as I was combing my hair, smelling her lemon shampoo on me, a twinkle in her eye, and said: “How bad do you hate this guy? Really. Bad enough to get even?”
I hadn’t even hesitated. Of course I hadn’t.
Not two weeks later, Lou was meeting him for drinks, having serendipitously met cute at the bar around the corner from the office where I knew he spent his weekday happy hours. I watched them talk as the happy hours stretched to closing, Lou laughing loud and throaty the way I already liked. One drink multiplied into four, and then she was all over him, kissing the corners of his mouth, squeezing him through his thin pants. I’d laughed out loud from my hiding place outside, I’d been so shocked by what I’d seen and how it made me feel, the pulse between my legs mingling with the power of knowing that together, Lou and I were dangerous.
It didn’t take much convincing on her part to get him back up to the office—I could picture her whispering into his ear, sibilant as a snake, I can’t stand it, I can’t wait, fill me up, please, please—and I followed them, taking the next elevator, getting off on the floor below and creeping up through the internal stairwell, waiting in the dark to hear what Lou said to him, did to him.
When she’d finished her work, leaving the Asshole tied up and naked in his boss’s office—the door bolted from the outside; I still remembered where the keys were—we’d leaned against the door stifling our giggles, Lou in her bra and jeans, as we listened to him cry and plead for her to “fucking end this, you sick bitch, not funny anymore, please, somebody, Jesus Christ!”
Laughed ourselves sick.
We’d thought we were so clever. We’d thought we were invincible that night.
Behind Lou in the bar, a mariachi strummed his guitar, serenading a tourist. “I’m sorry,” Lou said, raising her voice above the music. “That wasn’t fair of me. This week’s hell. There’s been a problem with—” Lou stopped herself, her gaze stony again. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled.
“What? What problem?” Oh God, I thought, the Lady knew about the money. And now Lou knew what I’d done, too.
Lou bit her lip, flicked her fingers against her glass, her nails clacking. “Nothing. Nothing to worry you, anyway.” Before I could ask anything else, she rushed on, “But the worst of it is I feel like . . . I guess I feel like . . . lately you’ve been avoiding me. Did I . . . did I do something?”
I felt a rush of guilt strong enough to knock the worry out of my head. Before anything else, Lou had always been there for me. “Of course not.” I reached a hand forward, hovered it over her own. Lou didn’t move, and I pulled it back. “I’ve been distracted. By Klein, Ellen.” I held up a hand as Lou started to say something, but I shook my head. If I closed my eyes, I could see Ellen’s teary face, pink feathers clinging to her goopy lip gloss, peering over her shoulder at me for one last affirmation I wouldn’t give before trudging up the stairs of her apartment. I sipped on my melting margarita. I was sure as hell not ready to talk about her yet. “Trust me. She’s fine. She’ll be fine. Thursday will be golden. She could win a goddamn Oscar for what she’ll do.”
“Okay,” Lou said, a small smile breaking through the thundercloud of her face. “I can’t wait to see those pictures. Tell Jackal to turn the video over.” She took a deep breath, pushed her bourbon away. “And then we can celebrate. With a real drink.”
“Let me buy you a drink now,” I said. “To make up for being so late.”
Lou shook her head, biting her lip. There was a glow in her eyes now. “I’m done paying for drinks.” She rolled her shoulders and took a languid look around the bar. She spotted them, the same couple I’d noticed earlier and flicked her eyes at me. A challenge. A game we’d played before.
“Batter up,” she said, and leaned forward and tapped my arm. Tag, you’re it. The spot burned through my sleeve. I had to keep myself from rubbing it.
Lou told me she didn’t keep score, but that was bullshit. I was currently up three drinks on her, but it had taken the nearly three years I’d known her to get there.
He was still talking to the woman, but his eyes found me, gave me an appreciative once-over—if I were a kinder woman, I’d tap his date on the shoulder and tell her to keep moving, her first instincts had been right. Instead, I smiled. Looked away, looked back. Smiled again.
But Lou was faster. She was out of her chair and bumping him from behind before I’d moved. This time, she wasn’t letting me win.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, all big eyes and innocence. She hadn’t even given me thirty seconds to make a move. Her fingers lingered on his sleeve and she flashed his date a sympathetic smile. “Did I spill your drink?”
The man was looking like he didn’t know where to look. Trapped between panicked and amused and not sure if he could believe his own good luck. I could almost see the wheels spinning in his head, the mental calculations of how many of us, and where, and when, and whose legs pressed against his face, his waist, his hips . . .
“My friend is a little clumsy,” I said, and his attention bounced back to me, a tennis match between women. His previously bored date sure looked interested now. You could almost call us matchmakers, Lou and me. “You should make her buy you both a round to make up for it. First dates aren’t cheap.”
“It’s not a—” The woman started but then cleared her throat and stared daggers at the two of us. “How did you know it was our first date?”
I shrugged and winked. “A lucky guess. I’m good at reading bodies.” I hid a chuckle in a cough. “Body language, I mean.”
And then he was stuck, volleying between the three of us, taking an extralong glance at the forty-five-degree angle I’d given him down my top. Lou had a little smile on her face and she was shaking her head at me: You amateur. But it was working. He took a look at his date, who’d stepped closer to him, and then at Lou absentmindedly stroking the material of his tie like she wasn’t even trying to do it.
“No need,” he said. “Why don’t you two join us. What can I get you?”
We would stay for two drinks slipped onto his tab, just long enough for the bartender to get comfortable putting our beverages under his name. By that time, he’d be slurring and she’d be as possessive as if she actually liked him. And because we’d picked a couple on a date, there was little risk he’d demand repayment, monetary or otherwise.
The date excused herself to go to the restroom, and her absence emboldened him. He leaned into Lou, shrugging his weight onto her shoulders and draping a hand across her knee. Without losing a beat, Lou clutched my chin, her fingers drink-chilled, drawing me in for a kiss. It wasn’t a regular part of our routine, and I could feel my heart skid as her nails scraped lightly against my jaw. Her lips were soft like lips and her tongue slid in between my teeth. She was selling it more than I was. I kept my hands to myself and my eyes closed and tried not to think of anything. After a few moments, she uncorked her mouth from mine with a pleasant little pop, and smiled at the man, who was watching the two of us, slack-jawed.
His date came back from the bathroom, but he couldn’t stop staring at Lou, breathing like he’d run a marathon, and I knew her: she wouldn’t be the first one to look away, either. I grabbed hold of Lou’s hand and we excused ourselves back to our table, her hot giggle breaths drifting over my shoulder, my neck. We made a good team.
The trick was in keeping an eye on the date. By the time they started to make restless movements—she’d gone to the bathroom twice now; he was sobering up for the 405 with glass after glass of water—we’d finished seven or eight margaritas. It was a challenge we’d issued to each other silently, to see how long we could last before we chickened out and left. We’d been caught only a few times before, but this was the real game, not the free drinks: which one of us could stand the heat longest.
Lou and I slipped out seconds ahead of him closing the tab, cutting it close, the reckless pounding in my chest a building volcano that spewed into guffaws as we tumbled out of the bar to the shower of expletives from behind us, the outrage at his racked-up bill following us into the street.
We put a little distance between us and him, taking the long way back to our cars. I waited to see if she would invite me to follow her, feeling a little foolish, not wanting to say goodbye. Lou stepped closer, hooking her arm in mine. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing I was, which was that it might be the last con we’d ever run together.
At her car, she turned to me and said, “Truce?”
I shook my head. “No need. Never any fight.”
She smiled back at me with her soft pink lips. “You have my lipstick on your teeth.” She leaned over and rubbed it away with her thumb. I didn’t move. Or breathe. Then she said, “I’ll think about what you said about Carrigan. I mean it. I know you have the best interests of us all at heart. I know you’d do anything for the Lady. For me.”
I thought of Ellen’s dark eyes, slick with tears, her red mouth open and trembling. Still in that pink party dress, shaking in her seat. Things I’d said to her that even I had never said to another living, breathing human before. But then I thought of the money that the Lady might already know was missing, and Lou’s big hurt eyes, roaming over the bar as she wondered where I’d been, why I was avoiding her, and knew I’d say those things all over again if I had to. I’d go to the end of the world to keep that expression from Lou’s face. If I had to.
“I would, Lou. Really, I would.”