Assume Nothing (12 page)

‘You better watch your mouth, little man,’ Clarke said.

‘What the fuck were you thinking? Reddick will go to the cops now for sure!’

‘Yeah? Then why aren’t
they
here talking to you instead of me? He’s had plenty of time to go to the cops if that’s what he’s gonna do, and he hasn’t. I’ve been out to his place and his wife’s a couple times already today and there ain’t a whiff of the police anywhere. Reddick’s a problem solved, Andy, because
I
fucking solved it.’

Baumhower wanted to call Cross immediately, but Clarke threatened to shove the phone up his ass if he dared try. ‘Don’t worry about Perry. I’m having dinner with him tonight, I’ll tell him then myself.’

‘And what the hell am I supposed to do in the meantime, Ben?’

‘Nothing. Behave normally. Keep your eyes open for the cops, and if they contact you, remain calm. Reddick can’t prove a fucking thing, Andy, and if he goes to the police, he won’t live long enough to even try.’

Baumhower blinked at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What do you think I mean? I told the man what I’d do if he opened his mouth and I wasn’t fucking around.’

‘Ben, for God’s sake—’

‘God ain’t got nothing to do with this. We’re all up to our necks in shit, man, and I for one ain’t going down without a fight.’

He wasn’t just talking; Baumhower could see that. He had always worried that Clarke’s barbaric tendencies would go too far someday, and it seemed that day had finally arrived. The man was prepared to kill three people, including a child, to spare himself a prison term, and he seemed to have no qualms about admitting it. If Baumhower had ever doubted before that the three friends to whose fortunes he had bound his own would someday lead to his total and complete destruction, he was no longer so misguided.

Now, in the wake of Clarke’s visit, Baumhower sat in his office like a figure chiseled in ice, so paralyzed by fear the mere thought of leaving his chair made his stomach turn. He picked up the phone twice to call Perry, despite all of Clarke’s warnings, only to put it down again, unable to imagine what Cross could possibly say or do to change anything. Baumhower could only hope that Clarke’s foolish gambit had, by some miracle, actually worked. His memory of Joseph Reddick was that of a man who would be difficult to rattle, somebody whose natural response to being threatened would not be fear but fury, but Clarke said he had a wife and child to consider, and that could make all the difference. Maybe, if Baumhower and his friends were lucky, Reddick cherished his family too much to risk doing anything that might result in their deaths at Clarke’s hand.

Maybe.

As the hours passed, and no calls or visits came from the police, Baumhower’s anxiety level slowly fell away. Reddick never left his thoughts for long but Baumhower became less and less convinced that the world would come crashing down upon his head any minute. He eventually left his office and, following Clarke’s advice, went about his business as normally as possible, an occasional glance over his shoulder the only outward sign of his diminishing paranoia. At the end of the day, dusk filling the sky black, he arrived at his ranch-style home in Chatsworth wary but unafraid, concerned for his safety only enough to check the street outside for police cars before pulling his Benz first into the drive and then the garage.

The garage door was almost fully closed behind him, the garage itself growing oddly dim, when he realized the overhead light was out. The door banged shut and he was plunged into total darkness. He hit the remote to open the door again but nothing happened; he could hear the sound of the opener’s motor running above his head but that was all. In a panic now, Baumhower threw open his car door, not intending to get out, but merely to bring the Benz’s interior lights to life . . .

. . . and had what felt like the hard, metallic nose of a gun pressed into the back of his skull, just above his left ear.

‘Make a sound and you’re dead. Any sound at all,’ Reddick said.

Baumhower knew it was Joe Reddick even before he spied his silhouette out of the corner of his eye, standing in the dark garage right beside him. His voice had the same ragged edge to it Baumhower had noticed six days ago out in Atwater Village, only tonight, it sounded a thousand times more sinister.

‘Please . . .’

‘That’s a sound. Shut your face or I kill you right here. Nod if you understand me.’

Baumhower nodded, fighting the urge to faint.

‘Slowly: Kill the engine, then get out of the car and into the house. Now,’ Reddick said.

Baumhower did as he was told, keeping his hands out to his sides to demonstrate how determined he was to cooperate. Reddick used the gun at the back of his head as a prod to steer him over to the door leading into the house, the one that was normally closed and locked but was standing open now. The idea that Reddick had already been inside his home, undeterred by the security system that should have detected his presence, added a whole new dimension to Baumhower’s fear and sense of violation. Who- or whatever Reddick was, he clearly had talents the average family man did not possess.

Reddick pushed Baumhower through his own home, beyond the kitchen off the garage, down the hall and into the spare bedroom Baumhower used as an office. The whole house was dark but Reddick was unfazed; he had obviously already staked the place out and knew the lay of the land. Terrified now, Baumhower was unable to hold his tongue any longer. ‘Please listen to me. If you’re here because of what happened to your wife and son—’

Reddick smashed the heel of his gun off the side of his head, knocking him to his knees. Baumhower brought a hand up, feeling for blood, and the tears he’d managed to hold off up to now filled his eyes.

‘You wanna talk? That’s good,’ Reddick said. He reached across Baumhower’s desk to turn on a small reading lamp, cutting the darkness only enough to cast them both in shadow. ‘Start talking.’

Baumhower blinked up at him, still on his knees, and got his first good look at Reddick’s gun and the right hand that was holding it. He was wearing surgical gloves, more evidence yet that he hadn’t come here just to talk.

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Start with a name for the asshole who broke into my home yesterday and go from there.’

‘I don’t—’

‘I’ve got no particular interest in torturing you, Mr Baumhower, but if you lie to me – just
once
– I promise you you’ll regret it.’

‘Ben Clarke,’ Baumhower said.

‘And who the hell is Ben Clarke to you?’

It took Baumhower a few seconds to decide how best to describe Clarke. ‘My business partner.’

‘OK. Now you can tell me why you sent him out to threaten the lives of my wife and son with a goddamn K-Bar knife.’

‘I didn’t send him out to do anything! I swear to God, I didn’t even know what he’d done until this morning!’

Reddick took a step forward, nudged the snout of his handgun into the side of Baumhower’s nose, hard.

‘It’s the truth!’ Baumhower cried, his eyes screwed tightly shut.

Reddick slowly backed off, eased himself into the chair sitting in front of Baumhower’s desk. ‘What’s this all about? Why’s it so goddamn important to you and Clarke that I not tell the police about our accident?’

Baumhower was slow to answer, nearly as terrified to speak as he was to hold his tongue.

‘We were afraid,’ he said finally.

‘Afraid of what?’

Again, Baumhower hesitated. ‘We didn’t want them to know I was there.’

‘Who? There where?’

‘The police. Near the river. We thought . . .’ He saw a vein in Reddick’s neck pulse, went on before the man could get up out of the chair and strike him again. ‘We thought if they found out about the accident, they’d know I was the one who . . . who . . .’ He couldn’t get the rest out.

‘I’m running out of patience, Andy,’ Reddick said, and if his words hadn’t conveyed this message, the edge to his voice, and the crushing weight of his gaze, would have.

‘They’d know I was the one who dumped Rainey’s body,’ Baumhower said, all in one breath, before he could lose the nerve.

Reddick fell silent, considering Baumhower’s answer. It made perfect sense, of course; a white panel van, leaping from a river access road on to the street in the dead of night, precipitating a collision Baumhower had at first attempted to ignore, then begged Reddick not to report.

‘Who was Rainey?’ Reddick asked.

‘Please. I can’t tell you any more. It was an accident. Nobody intended to kill anybody!’

Reddick rose to his feet. ‘One more time. Who was Rainey?’

‘Gillis Rainey. A friend of Perry’s who owed us money. He called himself a financial advisor but all he was was a con-man. A fucking liar and a thief!’

‘Hold it. Perry? Who the hell is Perry?’

Baumhower didn’t answer, cursing his own stupidity. He was needlessly giving Reddick more information than he was demanding to know.

Reddick sat back down in the chair, rolled it on its casters over to Baumhower until he was close enough to hold the gun an inch from his head.

‘OK. We’re gonna start over, from the beginning,’ he said. ‘And this time, you aren’t gonna leave out the slightest detail.’

Baumhower told Reddick everything, no longer giving a damn whether he was saying too much or not. Reddick asked few questions, and those only for clarification’s sake, content to let his hostage do all the talking. His expression had grown ever darker as the enormity of the bumbling criminal conspiracy he’d stumbled into became clear to him. By the time Baumhower was done, insisting he’d said all there was to say, Reddick resembled nothing as much as a hanging judge about to pronounce sentence. He’d known coming in that Baumhower and the big man who’d terrorized his family the day before were bad guys, deserving of his contempt if not an ounce of his mercy, but he hadn’t counted on discovering they were only two parts of a larger and more menacing whole. The knowledge raised the danger they represented to an entirely different level.

Baumhower saw the change in him and was justifiably alarmed by it. He’d been holding out the faint hope that telling Reddick what he wanted to know, without making any effort to save himself, would appease the man enough to spare his life. But now he wasn’t so sure. Now, Reddick was looking at him like the only thing he had left to decide was where in Baumhower’s body he should put the first bullet.

‘What are you going to do?’ Baumhower asked, voice quavering.

Contrary to what his hostage thought, Reddick had yet to make up his mind. His intent all along, insofar as his premeditation went, was to question Baumhower only long enough to learn Clarke’s identity and what secret he and Baumhower were so desperate to hide, then kill them both. Not to exact revenge or dispense justice, but to remove them as a threat to the people he loved in the most certain and permanent way possible. But now the game had changed; he had four people to worry about, not just two, and he might need to keep Baumhower alive, at least for a while, to get to the other three.

Reddick stood up and ordered Baumhower to do the same.

‘Please. What are you going to do?’ Baumhower asked again, getting slowly to his feet.

‘I heard you the first time. Shut up and let’s go,’ Reddick said. He waved his gun at the door.

It wasn’t the answer Baumhower wanted to hear. He had convinced himself that Reddick was going to kill him, no matter what he did, and the only reason he could think Reddick might have to take him out of the house was to do it somewhere remote, where no one would hear the shots and his body would neither soon nor easily be found.

‘No,’ Baumhower said. It had taken all the courage he could muster.

Reddick grimaced, his patience wearing thin. ‘One way or another, you’re going out that door,’ he said. ‘By your own power or mine, it makes no difference to me.’

‘I think you’re forgetting something, aren’t you? What Ben told you? If anything happens to me, your wife and little boy are
dead
.’

He hadn’t meant it as a personal threat. It was just a last ditch effort to save himself. But Baumhower could not have miscalculated any worse. Reminding Reddick of Clarke, and the promises of death the big man had made to Reddick the day before, did nothing but snap his tenuous hold on reason like a twig. In a single instant, any rationale Reddick may have had for keeping Baumhower alive was erased from his mind.

If anything happens to me, your wife and little boy are dead
.

Recognizing his mistake immediately, all Baumhower had time to do was watch Reddick point the gun at his face and pull the trigger.

FOURTEEN

A
t Cross’s insistence, he and Ben Clarke had dinner Saturday night at
Koi
in West Hollywood. Clarke hated sushi and wanted to dine at Nightshades, his club in Santa Monica, within the familiar and noisy confines of his private office overlooking the dance floor, but Cross wouldn’t hear of it. He was in a somber frame of mind and had no interest in trying to talk to Clarke amid the hedonistic trappings of one of his clubs.

They sat at a booth in the darkest of four dining rooms, candlelight casting bands of shadow across the walls, Cross eating avocado rolls and Yellowtail sashimi with gusto, Clarke picking at a bowl of white rice and roasted duck like a kid searching for a live bug. Neither paid any attention to the A-list celebrities occupying various other booths in the room, Cross because he didn’t give a damn and Clarke simply too miserable to notice.

‘Try him again,’ Cross said.

‘Fuck that. We’ve tried him three times already, he ain’t gonna answer the phone.’

‘He will eventually. He has to. Try him again.’

Clarke glowered at him but Cross wasn’t looking, too intent on eating to raise his eyes from his plate. Clarke thumbed the redial button on his phone one more time, listened as the call rang through yet again to Andy Baumhower’s voicemail.