Chapter 13

I’d noticed it in the Seven Galbi parking lot in the morning: brown Crown Vic, a lumpy cow of a car, no lights and no stickers, but there was no hiding that cop shape and sheen. I glanced through the window. No one inside. Nothing on the passenger seat. Could’ve simply been parked there—the lot was almost always empty in the morning—while the owner interviewed suspects or looted a doughnut shop. No need to jump the gun. Not every cop in this city is looking for you, Jo. Get it together. If it was still there at lunchtime, I would start to worry.

“Is there a Crown Vic parked outside?” I asked Jackal as soon as he dragged himself into the office. Not quite lunchtime, but still plenty to worry about. I leaned in his doorway and watched him ignore me from behind his computer screen, giving me the chance to stare at him. I can’t say it wasn’t an effective ploy on his part—he was so handsome. Damn him. I glanced around his office, looking for the contraband photos. I’d warned him that, even if I wasn’t going to say anything, he needed to get rid of them: couldn’t afford any chances for Lou to notice them. We both knew where her loyalties lay. I wasn’t sure if he’d taken my advice, or if he even intended to.

Jackal didn’t look up. “Don’t know. Didn’t check.”

“Some private eye you’d be,” I said, “with all those keen observational powers.”

He made a big show of tearing himself away from whatever he was working on and stared at me. Those dark green eyes fringed by lashes a mile long. Money eyes. “You look tired,” he said finally. “You didn’t call me last night.”

“There’s that silver tongue that charms all the ladies.”

“It doesn’t have to charm when it’s skilled at other things,” he said, a small smile quirking one side of his mouth.

He’d honed some talents in the workplace, for sure. “Have you ever thought of retiring? From the Lady’s line of work. How would you go about it?”

“Are you trying to make an honest man out of me?”

I smirked, laughing despite myself. “Never. I just wondered if you’d heard Lou talking about that before. Retirement.”

“Tired of the game?” Jackal squinted at me. “Or tired of the whole outfit? We could make a great team, you know. You could get back in touch with the marks, then I’d lay it on them . . .”

I shook my head. I wasn’t touching his side business with a ten-foot pole. “Has anyone done it before?” Watching him. Maybe he didn’t know what the Lady had done to his ex, either.

Jackal shrugged, looking bored. “Dunno.”

He wasn’t that good an actor. I picked at a splinter in the wood grain of his doorway. “What time are you heading to the St. Leo tomorrow?”

Jackal rolled his eyes. “Two thirty. As soon as the cleaners have finished. I’ll set up the room, then wait. I won’t even get up to take a piss. I’ll wait with my eyes glued to the screen for the world’s oldest show. You know all the years I’ve been doing this, it’s almost not even interesting anymore?” Jackal shook his head like he couldn’t believe it. “I guess after long enough, even screwing can be boring. Even tits.”

“Send me a picture of the room as soon as you get there.” Usually, I’d wait in the lobby to make sure Ellen and Klein were on schedule. But I knew I’d check the room more than once during the wait, to make sure Jackal was where he was supposed to be. “And then one every thirty minutes, so I know you’re still there.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Never,” I said. No window in Jackal’s room. I couldn’t even check if the car was still there. I plucked at the splinter, pulling out a small chunk of his door. “I bet that goddamn car hasn’t moved an inch.”

“What do you care? It’s not like they’re here to talk to you.”

I shook my head. I had to check or else I would go crazy, coming up with fantasies of the blues storming the office, demanding their money. Asking for Lou, asking for the Lady. I didn’t need that today of all days. Like Jackal, I should be thinking only about Klein. “You’re right. They’re not here to talk to me.”

Jackal stared at my face again. Lou would have known I was lying. Jackal might have. I couldn’t tell. I didn’t care. “I’ll be there this time, Jo. Trust me.”

“If I believed every man who told me to trust him, I’d be pregnant,” I snapped.

I stomped to the front windows and hooked a finger over one of the slats of the blinds, pulling it down so butter-yellow sunshine briefly blinded me. The car hadn’t moved. But I could see the outline of a body behind the steering wheel, a hand dangling from the now-opened window. I caught my breath and looked back at Jackal’s door. Still open, but he hadn’t gotten up from the desk. Lou wasn’t in yet—I wasn’t sure when she would be. I chewed my lip, watching the car. As long as he stayed put, I wouldn’t go down there. Nothing good will come of talking to him, Jo, I thought, even as I imagined Lou pulling into the lot, stopping to chat with him.

As I watched, convincing myself to stay where I was, the door opened and a salt-and-pepper squarehead climbed out of the car, glaring into the sunlight and looking around the strip mall, searching for something. With his eyes behind sunglasses, I couldn’t see what he was looking for, but he found something he liked and nodded once to himself, heading for the staircase that led up to our office.

The Korean barbecue was in full swing, and the smoke from the tasty beef stung my eyes as I rushed down the stairs. I could only make excuses, promise the money by next week, hope that would buy me enough time to get the money from Klein. If everything went smoothly, of course. Between the sting tomorrow and setting up the money drop, there were still so many pieces that could go wrong.

I headed the man off at the bottom of the staircase, gripping both sides of the railing so I didn’t slip a heel and go flying down into him. His expression didn’t change as I stopped on the step above the lot, so that I was a touch taller than him.

“Can I help you?”

He didn’t say anything. Thick around the jowls, neck like the trunk of a tree. His white button-down rolled up to expose a not-too-nice watch. I’d bet he’d been a cop since birth.

I crossed my arms over my chest and decided to play it righteous and offended. “We had reports that there was a man sitting in his car, staring at some of the women across the street. It was creeping the other girls out in the office, so I said I’d come check. Everything okay?”

He stared at me, not moving a muscle in his face, sizing me up. Taking in my face—I could feel it was pink, pinker than a trip down the stairs warranted—my hair frizzing in the morning heat, sweat darkening my blouse.

“Sorry,” he said finally. “I guess I should get going.” He didn’t move, but his gaze turned thoughtful and his sunglasses flicked up to the second story of the complex. “Looks like you were coming out of the Lady Upstairs’ Staffing Agency. Is that your office?”

Why had I said office? I could’ve bitten my tongue out. No choice now but to play it out. “That’s right.” I chucked my chin at the second story of the complex and shivered in the heat.

“So you must know Lou,” he said, smiling, friendly. We were chums now.

“I do.” I kept my face as stony as I could.

To my surprise, he simply nodded and smiled again, turning back to his car and lumbering inside. “Tell her MacLeish stopped by,” he said, “if you don’t mind. Tell her I’d be real happy if she gave me a call.” There was a message that would never get delivered.

He didn’t wait for me to respond. Instead, he rolled the car away, not moving quickly, holding up a hand out of the window in a parting goodbye. I breathed a sigh of relief, glancing quickly back up at the office. No Jackal silhouette, no telltale retreat from the window. I’d bought myself some time.

But only a very little bit. MacLeish had been friendly enough, hadn’t threatened me or even Lou. A simple request still. But then, it had only been a few days. It wouldn’t be long before the courtesies were replaced by something brassier. I had to fix it all, pay the bribe money back, before it ever came to that.

There would be no second chances this time. Because this was the second chance.

I’d almost toppled her empire once before.

If Lou’s and my little extracurricular excursion to pay back the Asshole had ended there, the two of us pressed cheek to cheek against the laminate wood of his boss’s door listening to him beg for help that wouldn’t come, my life would have been different. But then again, I might also have been an Ellen—a girl looking for a quick buck, an adventure, simply passing through the Lady’s enterprise on my way back to the straight and narrow. It could have so easily been that, if he hadn’t heard us. If he hadn’t found me.

But we must have been louder than I’d realized. Two days later, he was pounding down the front door of my soon-to-be-former apartment, yelling that if I didn’t let him in right the fuck now, he’d call the police on me and my little friend and whatever grifter game we had running.

“You think I don’t know the sound of your voice? You think I don’t remember the sound of your laughter?” the Asshole said, nearly cross-eyed with anger, slamming his fist into my Formica countertops.

It was, hands down, the most romantic thing he’d ever said to me.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. When he guessed I was involved, he’d followed me straight to Lou’s place. He knew we were in it together. I’d led him right to her. And because he was an asshole but not an idiot, he had enough of the pieces about the Lady’s agency to make real trouble. Lou hadn’t taken pictures. He had no reason not to go to the police. Unless we paid him one hundred large. He’d smiled as my jaw dropped. I had been the office manager—I knew what he made each year. It wasn’t even a drop in the bucket to him. But he might as well have asked me for a plane ticket to Mars, the sum was that far out of reach for me. And he knew it. He didn’t need the money. He just wanted to remind me what power really was.

He’d won. Again.

What choice did we have? I’d asked Lou. None, she’d told me. The only option was to fess up, come clean, fall on the mercy of our boss. She’d handle it for me—after all, before that moment, the Lady hadn’t even heard my name—but whatever terms the Lady set, I owed her.

The expense, Lou explained to me, hadn’t been only the bribe. It had been the protective measures the Lady was now taking. Before, Lou and Jackal had worked freelance, picking up cases from the Lady and coordinating over drinks or other public spaces. But the Asshole had figured it out—what was to keep him from threatening to go to the police again, even now that he had his money? The Lady’s arrangement with the police predated me, predated even Lou, but even they couldn’t sweep it under the rug if he made a big enough stink, got to the right person, an honest cop.

Enter: Perfect Alignment Massage. The Lady had bought the ailing business, done the bare minimum to convert the space. Now we had a legitimate cover, even paid taxes, the whole shebang. Girls? Of course we had girls coming through our doors. Los Angeles needed a lot of secretaries. We were doing the fine, upstanding work of placing them. Check the books. All in order. Every last penny accounted for.

Lou put a good face on it when we moved in. “This makes us respectable,” she told me. “It makes us more of a team.” We could call it Jo’s Place, she’d joked, since really I was responsible for the office in the first place, in a roundabout way. If only that wouldn’t attract too much attention, too many questions from passersby. Jo’s Place? A massage parlor? What exactly was offered . . . ? If only they knew.

At least the Lady hadn’t made me foot the rent bill on top of the bribe.

When I got back to the office, I stood in the front lobby for a moment, shaking. I made myself take three deep breaths before I moved, before I said anything. “I’m going home,” I called to Jackal. “Remember. The St. Leo. Two thirty tomorrow. Be there or I’ll drag you from the racetrack myself.”

“Take it easy on the bottle tonight,” he retorted.

I slammed the door to the office behind me. It wasn’t bad advice from him, for once, I thought. Only there was no way I was going to follow it. Not tonight.