Hard Case Crime: Money Shot (15 page)

Our destination was the food court and at that weekday lunch hour it was packed with cubicle drones wearing sensible shoes and laminated IDs around their necks. The ring of fast food options represented all the usual franchise suspects. Chinese, Italian, American, Middle Eastern. Ostensible variety that was really all the same school lunch food under different-flavored sauces.

Still, as much as I might hate malls, you had to admit Lia had made a smart choice for a meeting place. It was public, patrolled by security guards and packed with potential witnesses. I wondered how a girl who was essentially a captive sex slave from another country knew about this mall, but remembering her note claiming to have gotten one guy to “like her like a girlfriend” made me remember her expensive hair and nails. Her fancy heels. I pictured her working on her erstwhile beau to take her shopping. Batting her eyelashes and talking of lingerie and sexy shoes and all the while taking mental notes, memorizing everything. That girls had brains, I’d give her that. Brains and balls.

Malloy wanted us to move through the mall separately. Close but not obviously together.

“That way,” Malloy told me as he had parked the car up on a high, nearly deserted level of the parking structure, “if I get recognized, you won’t. We don’t know if your pal from Vegas got the note or information about its contents out of Zandora before we showed up or not. No point taking unnecessary chances.”

I opened the make-up mirror inside the visor on the passenger side and snuck a quick glance at the reflected image of that blond guy, Daniel. Imagining I was someone else made mirrors less of an ordeal.

The fading bruises around my eyes made the new blue contacts look lurid and too bright. The white tape had peeled off my nose in the shower that morning but some black sticky adhesive gunk was left behind and I couldn’t get it off because it hurt to scrub too hard. I ran a hand over the bleachy yellow buzz cut. I wouldn’t recognize me.

We left the car and headed down into the mall. I tailed Malloy past the Gap, past the Body Shop, threading through the lunchtime crowd in his wake until we reached the abovementioned food court.

I stationed myself by a smoothie stand where I had a decent view of the whole court and several exits. Every skinny blonde that passed made my heart twist under my ribs but none of them were Lia. Noon came and went without incident.

I watched Malloy lingering by the Sbarro and then without meeting my eyes he made a tight little gesture with his chin toward the stairs that led up to a second-level seating area. Unsure if he meant for me to follow him or not, I watched him head up, out of sight. Then, less than ten seconds later, he was heading back down. I could read the tension under his casual stroll and I wasn’t all that surprised when I spotted the weasel, my pal from Vegas, coming down the steps behind him.

I turned away, pretending to study the smoothie menu while watching Malloy out of the corner of my eye. He walked right past me and went into the bookstore on my left. I had no idea what he was doing. Apparently, neither did the weasel, but he followed Malloy into the store anyway.

I knew nothing could happen here in the mall, in full view of the security guards and all these civilians, but I also figured the weasel would follow us up through the parking structure and in that big hollow empty space it would be a whole different story.

Malloy and I had agreed that if anything went wrong in the mall, I was supposed to get the hell out and catch a bus back to his place. He had given me a spare key and when he’d slipped it into my hip pocket, I’d felt almost like we were dating or something. I had spent more solid back-to-back time with Malloy than with anyone else since I’d moved out of my parents’ house back in Chicago, yet we were not sleeping together. It felt so strange, unnatural somehow.

Watching Malloy browsing through the bookstore like there wasn’t a homicidal scumbag following him around, I wondered if now wasn’t a good time to bug out. Before I could decide one way or the other, I saw Malloy stumble and bump into the weasel, slapping his shoulder and smiling in that same dumb, friendly manner he had when he went into Eye Candy. I watched with baffled amazement, squinting and trying to figure out what the hell he was doing.

After his collision with the weasel, Malloy made his roundabout way out of the store. When the weasel followed, the shoplifting alarm went off.

Security guards immediately confronted the weasel and, after much protest from him, one of the guards pulled a small gilt-edged gift book from his jacket pocket. Some cheesy little thing full of uplifting quotes and photos of kittens, the kind of thing that you get as a gift from your grandmother and never read. Chicken Soup for the Homicidal Scumbag’s Soul.

Malloy passed by me and whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

“Car,” he said.

Then he was gone.

The weasel was being escorted out of the mall while shouting angrily into his cell phone. I looked back up at the smoothie menu as if deciding between the Berry-licious VitaWhip or the Banana Mango Fandango. The busty, cow-eyed brunette behind the counter suddenly turned to me with an expression of startled panic, as if she’d only just noticed me even though I’d been standing there for several minutes. Her hair was chopped into one of those weird new mullety, cowlicky bowl-cuts and she had a ring through her lower lip that looked painfully infected. She grimaced and recited her upbeat franchise-robot script with a clenched and desperate tone.

“Good afternoon, sir, and welcome to Nutra-Freeze Healthy Smoothie Paradise. Can I take your order?”

Sir.
God that was weird. I waited until the weasel made like Elvis and left the building, then I shook my head at the smoothie girl.

“I... uh... changed my mind,” I told her.

She looked painfully relived. I thought, not unkindly, that with an impressive natural rack like hers, she’d do better to ditch the ugly orange Nutra-Freeze tunic and get into porn. That thought made me think of Sam. Thinking of Sam hurt and so I forced myself to think of getting the hell out of there.

I hustled back the way I came and headed for the parking structure. As I went, every single person I passed seemed leering and sinister. Teenage boys. Moms with strollers. Mall-walking grannies. They all looked like axe murderers to me. Paranoia notwithstanding, I somehow found my way back to the level where Malloy had parked the car.

I could hear a terse, stifled rhythm of punches and grunts coming from the opposite side of Malloy’s SUV and my blood went cold. I stood there for a heartbeat or two, dumb and frozen like a rabbit in the headlights. Then, on a split-second impulse, I headed diagonally away from Malloy’s car and over toward the only other vehicle parked on that level, a green minivan.

Standing by the minivan, fumbling through my pockets in a lame-ass pantomime of looking for keys I didn’t have, I risked a peek back toward Malloy’s car. I saw Malloy in a fierce, sloppy scuffle with a guy who was a little shorter than him but much thicker. The shorter guy looked like he was getting the upper hand over Malloy. There was blood on Malloy’s flushed face and on the oily concrete at their feet. That’s when I simultaneously realized two things. First, that the guy fighting with Malloy was the rhino—the guy who’d shot Sam in the knee. Second, that I had a loaded gun in my duffel bag.

My first instinct was pure and unequivocal. Kill the son of a bitch. I knew in my gut that he had been the one who put the two bullets in the back of Sam’s head.

But he and Malloy were close as lovers, moving erratically in every direction. I’m not a bad shot. I can hit pretty close to the middle of the paper guy more than half the time at the calm, empty shooting range. But in a situation like this, with my hands shaking, an unfamiliar gun and Malloy right there... well, I just didn’t want to take any chances.

I put my hand inside the duffel bag and unzipped the inner pocket, closing my fingers around the cold weight of the pistol’s nubby, ergonomic grip. I fumbled along the length of the barrel, hunting for the safety and feeling like my heart was going to burst inside my chest.

I wanted to shout something tough and manly like
Freeze, motherfucker, or I’ll blow your balls off!
In the end I just pointed the gun and yelled, “Hey!”

The rhino and Malloy both turned toward my voice. There was no recognition in the rhino’s eyes as he sized up this fey blond boy holding a gun. Then, almost before I could register what was happening, Malloy took advantage of the unexpected distraction to let the guy have it hard, right on the button. The rhino spun and crumpled to the concrete.

I rushed to Malloy’s side, looking up into his bloody face.

“You okay?” I asked.

“You should see the other guy,” he replied with that stingy rind of a smile on his bruised lips. He opened the driver’s side door. “Let’s get the hell out of here before any more of them show up.”

I was about to go around to the passenger side and get in the car when I looked down at the rhino. He was unconscious, face down on the concrete and making a sort of snoring sound, arms and legs twitching like a dog chasing dream rabbits. Without even realizing I was doing it, I raised the gun and aimed it directly at the back of his head. My whole body felt cold and numb.

“Angel,” Malloy said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

I shook him off and centered my aim again. I thought of Sam, of Georgie and all the shoots we did together. The fresh potato salad she always made and the time Sam put that strap-on dildo around his forehead and ran around the set claiming to be a unicorn looking to put his head in a virgin’s lap. I dropped down on one knee beside the man who’d killed him and pressed the snout of the gun against the curve of the fucker’s skull.

“Think for a second, Angel,” Malloy asked quietly. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

I could hear the sound of Malloy’s voice, but somehow it didn’t seem to relate to me. All I could hear was that scream, that horrible high-pitched, almost child-like scream that had torn up out of Sam’s throat when the rhino shot him in the knee. The only thing I was sure of was this kind of delirious, narcotic fury that gripped me and wouldn’t let me go. I pulled the trigger.

The rhino was dead before I could put a second hole alongside the first, but I felt I needed to do it anyway, for Sam. The pistol’s kick resonated endlessly along the long bones of my arm and my unprotected ears rang and then Malloy was grabbing me, hustling me roughly into the car and peeling out.

“Give me the gun,” he said as he hung a sharp turn onto Moorpark.

I let him pry my fingers gently off the pistol’s grip and then stash the gun under his seat.

I felt cold and muffled, as if I were underwater. The familiar, franchise-laden Valley landscape seemed hyper-detailed and implausible, like something drawn by a comic book artist on speed, but my own inner landscape was blurry and unclear.

If I’d been unsure how to feel about Malloy after witnessing what he had done to that thug in Vegas, how was I supposed to feel about myself now? That guy in Vegas had been trying to kill Malloy. Malloy was simply defending himself, even if he ultimately went too far. Me, I had shot and killed an unconscious man. Sure, he was trying to hurt Malloy, maybe kill him. He had shot Sam in the knee right in front of me, if not killed him, too. But the guy had been out like a baby when I’d shot him. What sort of person did that make me?

As if reading my mind, Malloy arched a silver eyebrow at me.

“Guess I was wrong about you,” he said.

I remembered Malloy saying that he thought I wasn’t the cold-blooded execution type. Tabby had said basically the same thing. Were they wrong? Had the events of the last few crazy days changed who I was or just allowed me to finally become who I had been all along?

There was something different in Malloy’s guarded eyes when he looked at me now. I couldn’t tell if it was admiration or wariness.

“Pull over,” I hissed, breaking eye contact and clutching the dashboard as I was broadsided by a brutal wave of nausea.

I barely shouldered open the door in time to puke violently into the leafy gutter just before the corner of Riverside and Van Noord.

Malloy waited out my bout of dry heaves. I felt fairly close either to passing out or turning inside out when I finally slammed the door, leaned back and rested my pounding head against the seat.

“It’s no big deal,” Malloy said, putting the car in gear and pulling back out into traffic. “Lots of guys puke the first time.”

He reached under his seat and for a crazy second, I though he was going to pull out the gun. Instead, he came up with an unopened bottle of water and offered it to me without taking his eyes off the road. I accepted the water gratefully and took a deep swig. It was warm as tea, but I needed it.

“I was thirty,” Malloy told me as we waited at a red light. “It was two days after my birthday. I was still a rookie back then. Got a kinda late start on the job.”

He stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and punched the dashboard lighter. The light changed and he hit the gas.

“Anyway,” he continued, unlit cigarette bouncing as he spoke. “My partner and me, we got a call that this crackhead left her newborn baby in the toilet at a Carl’s Jr. Left it in there just like you’d leave a dump.” He shook his head. “We found her right around the corner, sitting on the ground, hitting the pipe like nothing happened. She was still bleeding down her legs. When my partner confronted her, she acted like she didn’t hear him. Then when he took a step closer, she pulled out this knife. I don’t mean some kind of pocketknife, I mean a big old kitchen knife like the kind on TV that cuts through tin cans. She stuck that knife right in Laimert’s calf. So I shot her.”

The lighter popped out. Malloy took it out and touched it to the end of his cigarette.

“I thought I was OK about it at first. I mean she was just a skinny little thing, barely more than a kid, but she was out of her fucking mind. She drowned her own baby in a dirty toilet and stabbed a cop. She had it coming, no doubt about it. But two hours later I was typing up some paperwork and all of a sudden, I saw her again, lying there on her side, and I puked right on the typewriter.”