Assume Nothing (3 page)

Reddick’s Mustang sat there making ticking noises on the wrong side of the street, the stench of burning rubber thick in his nose.

‘Crazy sonofabitch!’

He looked over at the van, wired with adrenaline, watched in amazement as, its engine still running, it began to roll forward and then accelerated.

The guy wasn’t going to stop.

Incredulous, Reddick restarted the Mustang, slammed it into gear, and mashed on the gas to go after the idiot.

It only took him forty seconds to catch up with him.

Driving home less than a half-hour later, hands still slick with sweat, Andy Baumhower knew he was in big trouble.

It would have been inaccurate to say he was surprised, however, because he’d been waiting for disaster to strike all night. Disaster was the fate of all amateur felons eventually, and that was what Baumhower was tonight, an amateur. Just a white collar criminal playing a big league game. If he hadn’t fucked up by causing an ill-timed car accident, he would’ve found some other way to do it.

Still, he considered himself lucky. He’d managed to escape from this guy Reddick, the Mustang’s driver, without having to deal with the police. They had exchanged addresses and phone numbers, and insurance and driver’s license info, and that was it. The damage to both vehicles had been minimal and no one, thank God, had been hurt. Reddick had wanted to call the cops anyway, enraged by Baumhower’s foolish attempt at hit-and-run, but Baumhower had talked him out of it, playing the remorseful, apologetic sop who couldn’t afford another hike in his insurance rates to the hilt.

Not that Reddick had been an easy sell. He’d no more bought Baumhower’s reasons for not wanting the police involved than he had the younger man’s explanation for why he’d been where he was when the accident occurred: coming off an LA River access road that should have been closed to the public. Baumhower had said he’d mistaken the dark access road for an on-ramp to the adjacent Glendale Freeway and quickly reversed his field, not bothering to watch for opposing traffic upon re-entry to Fletcher Drive. Reddick hadn’t asked him to elaborate, just accepted his story in silence, but Baumhower could tell he wasn’t fooled. He’d only acted like he was for reasons of his own.

Which was why Baumhower was worried now, sweaty palms sliding all over the wounded van’s wheel as he raced home to Chatsworth. The feeling Reddick had left him with was that he wasn’t a man easily duped. That he had seen through Baumhower like an open window and would come back to haunt him later. Maybe even as early as tomorrow.

When Baumhower would have to explain to his three accomplices why they should have never asked him to dispose of Gillis Rainey’s body in the first place.

TWO

T
hat night, as Reddick might have guessed it would, the nightmare revisited him. Beginning, as always, in his old green Pontiac, rolling through a dark Florida landscape toward home . . .

He woke up. Mouth open but silent, a fistful of bed sheet in each hand.

He was rigid with fear and his breathing was ragged, but he wasn’t screaming. He had learned to stop screaming long ago. The mattress beneath him was soaked with sweat. He looked at the clock on his bedside table, saw that it was only four a.m. He hadn’t been asleep more than two hours.

Once upon a time, there had been no rhyme or reason to the timing of the nightmare’s appearances. It came and went as it pleased, requiring no inducement to show itself. But no more. Nine years and two shrinks had at least seen to that. Now when the dream came to him, it was as a reflex action, a delayed response to some sudden anxiety. A deep sense of guilt or rage; even sexual excitement could sometimes precipitate the nightmare’s invasions of his sleep.

This time it was fear.

Or at least, the odd sensation that trouble, in one shape or another, lay just ahead. Good cops learned to sense trouble coming from miles away and Reddick was no exception. Even after years away from the job, his instincts about such things remained unassailable.

This guy Baumhower, the dickhead in the white Chrysler van tonight, had been bad news. His story about why he’d come flying off that LA River access road the way he had was bullshit, and there’d been more to his reluctance to file a police report than any fear of having his insurance rates go up. A stone-cold killer the guy wasn’t – he was too much of a wuss for that – but Reddick was fairly certain that, whatever he’d been doing just prior to plowing his van into Reddick’s Mustang, it had probably been something a real cop might want to investigate.

Why he should have cared what the truth was, no longer being a real cop himself, Reddick didn’t know. His only interest in Baumhower now should have been a check from him for the damages to his car, plus any medical expenses he might incur later. And yet, Reddick couldn’t shake the feeling that Baumhower was an omen of some kind. The tip of some disastrous iceberg that would soon be in his path.

And he worried that this would not be the last restless night he endured on the little asshole’s account.

THREE

‘
F
or Chrissake, Perry, let me kill the dumb fuck,’ Ben Clarke said. ‘Please.’

Clarke was sitting in one of the two leather chairs opposite Perry Cross’s office desk, glaring at Andy Baumhower with what could only be described as utter contempt. Clarke was a big man with a flat, linebacker’s face, and when he scowled, his black eyes all but disappeared beneath the overhang of his slab-like brow. It was a countenance that had to be seen to be properly appreciated.

The whippet-thin Baumhower, meanwhile, one of Clarke’s three equally white, twentysomething partners in the fledgling consortium of diverse businesses they called ‘Class Act Productions,’ was perched on a stool at Cross’s wet bar, right alongside Will Sinnott, who was already hard at work on tomorrow morning’s hangover.

‘Fuck you, Ben,’ Baumhower said.

Drunk or sober, he wasn’t fond of Clarke, and had never gone out of his way to disguise the fact. On several occasions, in fact, in order to receive the respect he felt his Herculean stature deserved, Clarke had found it necessary to demonstrate to Baumhower just how easily he could break the smaller man’s neck. Another such demonstration seemed to be in the making until Cross, to whom Clarke deferred shamelessly, raised a hand to freeze him in his tracks.

‘Take it easy, Ben. Andy ran into a little bad luck, that’s all.’

Cross was standing before the wall of dark, one-way glass that stretched from floor to ceiling behind his massive rosewood desk, watching an elderly woman with a head full of alarming white hair blow a five-foot putt by a mile. From his office suite up on the nineteenth floor of the Century Court Towers building in Century City, his view of the Los Angeles Country Club’s back nine was without limit, and he often liked to show his back to his three friends in order to follow play down on the greens.

‘Bad luck my ass,’ Clarke said. ‘He fucked up. We’re all dead now, and he knows it.’

‘It wasn’t my fault, asshole,’ Baumhower said.

‘Yeah? You should’ve run away, you dipshit! The guy can place you at the scene now. He’s got your name, your address—’

‘It doesn’t matter, Ben,’ Cross said flatly, shaking his head. ‘Better that it weren’t true, yes, but as long as this fellow never comes to connect Andy to Gillis’s body . . .’

‘What, and you don’t think he
will
? The master criminal here dumped Rainey in an open storm drain, for Chrissake. After we told ’im to lose the body where nobody’ll ever find it.’ He turned to Baumhower again. ‘In case you never heard, Einstein, the homeless hide out in those storm drains all the time. If one of ’em doesn’t come across Rainey before the week is out, it’ll be a goddamn miracle.’

‘All right! I made a mistake! I think we all get it, Ben, Jesus!’ Baumhower had had enough of Clarke’s constant harping. ‘But let’s not forget whose idea it was for
me
to get rid of the body in the first place, shall we? If you’re such a goddamn expert on the proper disposal of dead bodies, why the hell didn’t you and Perry take care of RaIney’s yourselves?’

‘Because you’re the one who killed the poor bastard,’ Sinnott said. It was the first time he’d opened his mouth all morning.

Baumhower turned to face him, surprised. He and Sinnott weren’t allies, exactly, but they often found themselves on the same side of an issue whenever Cross and Clarke, the master and his lackey, joined forces in a company debate. Baumhower couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed, having the fat and inebriated wuss that was Will Sinnott turn on him now.

Even if every word he’d just said was true.

They were just four little rich boys with money. Murder was supposed to be out of their league.

Clarke’s old man was a
Fortune 500
communications magnate; Baumhower’s father was an internationally renowned orthopedic surgeon and his mother an equally famous divorce attorney; Sinnott’s parents were just plain filthy rich, born to money made three generations ago in the newspaper and textile industries. All the wealth and power Cross possessed, however, he had amassed himself, in spite of his parents. His father was the alcoholic owner/operator of a fast food franchise in North Hollywood, and his mother was a part-time stenographer. Neither had ever given Cross a dime.

Clarke and Sinnott had attended Stanford together and had hooked up with the other two after graduation through various intermediaries. Cross had been a regular at McCullough’s, Clarke’s Westwood area nightclub, and the two hit it off immediately, Clarke all but mesmerized by the other man’s moviestar good looks and unflappable cool. The four became inseparable – two sociopaths and a couple of weak sisters who admired them – and they all shared the same ambitions toward fame, fortune, and autonomy from the moral boundaries that lesser men had to abide by. They formed Class Act Productions so as to pool their resources and unify their efforts to become billionaires by the time they were each thirty-five. That they might find it necessary to break a law or two along the way concerned none of them in the least, though only Clarke would not have blanched at the idea of murder.

But murder was what they had committed, however inadvertently.

Baumhower and Sinnott had been against Cross’s insane plan to kidnap Gillis Rainey from the start. They wanted no part of it. But Rainey owed them money he seemed determined not to repay and Cross was insistent that such desperate measures were necessary to get it back. He not only wanted a unanimous vote on the old fool’s abduction, he demanded they all take an active role in the enterprise, something only Clarke was eager to do. Sinnott, being the gutless wonder that he was, eventually caved in to them both, and that left Baumhower no choice but to do likewise, certain that the fifty-one-year-old Rainey’s kidnapping would somehow blow up in their faces.