Cash Burn (11 page)

Flip leaned in the open doorway to his apartment. He wore a sweatshirt that bore a paisley-shaped brown stain. Wrinkles were pressed into the shirt and pants in vertical and diagonal crossing patterns without connection to the angles of his joints.

He’d just changed clothes.

“You’re working late, Officer.” Flip’s forehead gleamed dully with dried sweat.

“Where’ve you been, Flip?”

“I’ve been home. Why?”

“No, you haven’t been home. I’ve been calling every twenty minutes for two hours.”

“Oh, was that you? If I knew it was you, I would’ve answered. For sure. I figured it was a telemarketer.”

The smirk made Tom want to plant the nose of his Glock against Flip’s temple. “I don’t buy that for a second. Where have you been?”

“I’m starting to get the feeling you don’t trust me.”

Tom snorted. “You’re getting that feeling. All right. Let me ask you something. What were you doing in that house?”

Flip straightened away from the jamb, and his arms uncrossed.

We’ve got something here.

“House?” The word belonged to a sentence Flip seemed unable to mouth.

“Yeah. House. It’s a building people live in.”

Flip twisted his neck. A faint pop passed through the still air. This convict might bolt. Or fight. Adrenalin pumped through Tom’s veins, flushing away the fatigue.

Flip didn’t answer.

“I know you were in there, Convict. I know it. I can see it on your face.” Tom stepped forward. “That’s your third strike. You know what that means. Prison till you die.”

Flip bent his head forward, looked past Tom to one side of the hallway, then the other. He faced Tom and sneered. It might have been meant as a grin.

Tom’s palm itched for the handle of his Glock. He angled his body to hide his right arm and unsnapped the strap locking the weapon in place and stepped toward Flip. “You cut the power and found the unlocked door. You were in her room and she knew it. The kid surprised you, didn’t he?”

Flip’s face relaxed, and laughter burst out. Tom was close enough to smell the rank sourness of his breath.

Somewhere down the hall behind a closed door, a voice called out telling them to shut up. Flip looked past Tom to see where the voice had come from.

“What’s so funny, Convict?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s funny, Officer. I just can’t figure why you keep showing up here.”

“She knew you were in there.”

He leaned against the jamb again, and his arms filled the sleeves of his sweatshirt when he crossed them. “Then where’s the LAPD? How come I’m not in a holding cell someplace?” He brought a finger out, and poked Tom’s chest. Tom slapped it away. Flip laughed again. “I’ll tell you why. Because you got nothing. You spend your night spying on me. Show up here at midnight asking your stupid questions. What do you think you’re going to get done here, Officer Cole?”

“Where were you tonight, Convict?”

Flip stood and put a hand on the edge of the door. “I was right here in my
home
, Officer. I was meditating, contemplating my new law-abiding life. And now I’m going to go to sleep because I have to go work at my law-abiding job in the morning. Unless you’ve got any more questions.”

“I’m going to search your cell.”

“Knock yourself out.” Flip stepped into the hallway and Tom locked him out.

The kitchen was no cleaner than it was the last time Tom was here. The bed was still unmade.

Tom kept seeing the mother’s face—Kathy Russell’s. Minding her own business, trying to raise a son with a few problems, and this convict busts into her house and kills him. The certainty that it was Flip made Tom want to take him in and let him sweat in jail until he got around to scheduling a parole hearing. But he had nothing on him, and Flip would be out again in a few weeks.

It was maddening. All his training, all his experience told him to stay professional, not to take this personally, but Tom felt his own inability to do anything about the kid’s murder like an accusation.

He went to the chest of drawers and drew out the top drawer. He dumped its contents on the bed. Clots of socks and underwear rolled out. He dropped the drawer on the floor. The next one held a couple of T-shirts. Those went on the bed too, and the second drawer clattered on the floor.

Finding nothing only made him angrier.

The last two drawers were empty, but he pulled them out anyway and ran his hand along the inside of the cabinet. Nothing. He leaned it away from the wall and let it fall to the floor.

Someone in the apartment downstairs pounded on the ceiling, and a muffled shout came through the floorboards.

Tom went to the bed. He lifted the mattress away from the box springs. Nothing hidden; he tossed it up against the wall anyway. Clothes and blankets jumbled away from the edges. Nothing was under the box spring either.

He went to the bathroom, reached behind the toilet, felt the cool, vacant porcelain of the tank and lifted the lid to peek inside. The medicine chest was nearly empty.

In the kitchen, he rifled through the dishes piled in the sink, ran his hands over all the cabinet surfaces inside and out, and scooted the refrigerator away from the wall to search the space behind.

Nothing.

Back in the living room, Tom unzipped the sofa cushions and felt inside, threw each of them to the floor, and overturned the sofa. He ignored the thumping from the unit downstairs.

The television was the only thing left. Letterman was interviewing some actor. Tom pulled it screen-down onto the floor. The plug yanked out of the wall.

Nothing back there. Tom turned to the door. He opened it.

Flip leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. Tom told him, “Get in here.”

Flip walked inside and stared at the way Tom had thrown the television facedown. “The TV? I might have to bill you for that.”

“Sit down.”

“I like standing.”

Tom pulled the ankle monitor out of his back pocket. “I’m putting you on a tether.”

Flip’s face leveled. “That’s going to mess up my social life.”

“Tough. I’m sick of you lying to me. Sit down, Convict.”

He didn’t move. Those doll eyes held fast on Tom’s.

“I don’t have all night. Here’s how this is going to work. You sit down and put this on, or I violate you right now and take you downtown.” He drew his weapon.

Flip’s jaw flexed. “Violate me for what? Not answering my phone?”

“You think I need probable cause or something? This isn’t the first time you’ve been on parole. You know how it works. Now I’m going to give you three seconds to sit down and ankle up, or we can take a drive and get you processed.”

He grinned. “You don’t need to get excited, Officer. I’m law-abiding. I got nothing to hide.” Flip went to the sofa.

Tom stood over him. “Put it on.” He tossed the monitor in Flip’s lap and stepped back.

Unfastened, the curved black band gaped on top of Flip’s sweats like a plastic trap, the rectangular transmitter on one side the size of a box of cartridges. It was expensive, and it had taken Tom half an hour of wrangling to get departmental permission, but he couldn’t surveil Flip all the time. This way he could do it from the computer in his office.

Flip’s grin was long gone. He lifted up the device and examined it.

“Just put it on.”

“I don’t know how.”

“You’ve got ten seconds to figure it out, Einstein.”

Flip bent over and peeled up the leg of his sweats to reveal his left ankle. He slipped the band around and found the slot to insert the tip of the band. It clicked through but left a gap between his ankle and the strap.

The weight of the Glock felt like the handshake of an old friend in Tom’s fist. “Tighter.”

Flip looked up at him. Black eyes fixed, he snapped it one more notch.

“Now put your hands behind your back.”

Flip sat back and tucked his hands between the sofa and the small of his back.

Tom came to him and, not taking his eyes off him, kept the nose of the Glock pointed at Flip’s chest. He reached down with his left hand to the floor so his aching knees didn’t have to take the strain of kneeling. “You want to sit very still right now, Convict.”

Flip only stared at him.

Tom tugged at the monitor. Firm.

Now, to rise. Tom used his left hand for leverage. But his knees betrayed him. A sharp pain, the deepest in months, pierced his kneecap. Both hands instinctively went to the ground. The Glock pointed away from Flip for an instant.

Tom knew what was about to happen.

The convict snapped away from the sofa. His hands cleared out from behind him.

Flip’s close-cropped head flew at him.

The Glock clattered to the carpet. Flip was on top of him.

Flip’s fist eclipsed the ceiling lamp. The impact was a thunderbolt exploding inside Tom’s brain.

Another.

Blackness.

19

Exposed by the blaring light outside Diane’s building, Flip waited for someone to exit or enter so he could tailgate his way in. No one moved on the silent street. He felt naked out here.

Finally someone came into the lobby, walking like he was wearing new feet. Drunk, almost certainly. He pushed through the door before noticing Flip.

Flip grabbed the handle of the door. The drunk eyed him out of his haze and mumbled, “Howyadoin?” before teetering on.

Flip couldn’t wait in the bright lobby for the elevator.

His knuckles ached every time he gripped the handrail as he went upstairs.

It took too long to get her to the door. The hallway walls seemed to shout his name every time he knocked. When she finally opened the door, she stared at him for a moment as if she’d never seen him before.

“Come in. Quick.” She backed away to let him in, and he looked her over. An oversize T-shirt reached down to the tops of her thighs.

She folded her arms. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

“I got no place else to go.” He closed the door and turned to her.

“What’s the matter with your apartment?”

Flip couldn’t bring himself to look in her eyes.

“What did you do, Flip?”

“My PO—he was going to put a tether on me.”

“A what?”

“One of those ankle things where they know where you are all the time.”

Her eyes shifted to his ankles. He wanted to duck behind the sofa.

“So?”

“So I couldn’t let him do it, could I?”

Her eyes leveled. “What. Did. You. Do?”

He went to the sofa and sat. She stood before him, waiting.

“I had to hit him.”

Diane rolled her eyes and turned, her arms flapping at her sides.

“I couldn’t let him do it, Di. It would’ve ruined our whole plan.”

She faced him and pointed to her chest. “Why didn’t you just cut it off after he left? Why’d you have to hit him?” She stopped. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

He looked at his hands. The last thing he wanted to tell her was that he’d lost his cool, that he’d just wanted to hit the guy. “No.”

Diane folded an arm across her chest and brought up a hand to her lips. Flip couldn’t look up at her. As she stood thinking, her toes flexed against the carpet. Her toenails were painted pink.

“Well, you can’t stay here. Did anybody see you come in?”

“No. Look, just one night. Tomorrow night I’ll find someplace else.”

She went to the window and edged the drape aside an inch to peek out. “Nobody can see you here.”

“Nobody will. You know me. I’m the invisible man.”

Diane turned, and Flip’s eyes finally traveled up to her face.

“It’s not that I don’t want you here, darlin’.” Her posture settled, arms loosening, and she came to him. A hand came to his arm, stroked. “But until we get this thing done, we have to be really careful. Come here.”

She pulled him to the sofa and sat next to him. “Let me think a minute.” She tapped a pink fingernail against her front teeth. “I know.” She rose away from him, and went into the bedroom. He heard a drawer slide, and in a moment she was back. “Here’s a hundred. There’s a place down off Sepulveda, past Venice Boulevard. Go there for tonight, and we’ll figure something out tomorrow.” She handed the money to him. “This’ll be plenty.”

He fingered the cash, looking up at her. “You’re putting me out.”

Coming to him, sliding onto the sofa next to him, a hand to his face, she pleaded. “Flip—darlin’—don’t you know this is hard for me, too? Being apart from you all this time? After you just got out? It’s agony. But it’ll be just a few more months. Soon we’ll be together.
Really
together.”

She brought her lips to his. They searched him out, made him melt inside, and he saw that this was what he had needed, what he had really come here for—not a roof to sleep under, not safety, but this.

She ended it. Her tongue crept over her lips, and she smiled. “Just a few more months.”

He wanted to taste them again. He bent toward her. She gave them to him for an instant and was gone.

“Come on, now.” She rose, and he followed her. She opened the door a crack, then eased it wide enough to look up and down the hall. She turned to him. “Be quick. Don’t be seen.”

One more kiss. He wrapped an arm around her, considered slamming the door and carrying her into the back room.

She pulled back. “Just a few months.”

His breath was quick, his heart slamming against his ribs for want of her. But this job was more important. It would get them where they wanted to be. “All right.” He stepped past her and peeked outside before turning to her one final time. “How much you think we’ll take?”

She came close again and pressed her body against him. “Flip, darlin’, we’ll be papering our walls with Benjamins.”

* * *

Pain knifed through Tom Cole’s skull. “Ohhh.”

His head rolled. Something was in his mouth, hard and heavy, its edge cutting at his tongue. He spit it out, and it fell onto his neck and off to the side.

He put a hand to his face, felt slickness with the consistency of oil.

But it wasn’t oil.

His eyelids split like cracking eggshells, and the reality of place and time nudged into his mind.

Flip Dunn’s apartment. A dirty carpet mushed underneath Tom’s wounded head where it lay in a puddle of his own blood. The reek of the unwashed residue of Flip’s life drifted in the air underneath the crushing pain in Tom’s skull.