Infamous (56 page)

“While proclaiming your undying love for me,” she said, and she couldn’t help it, she teared up again. “Which I almost walked away from.”

“Hey,” he said, kissing her. “The important word there is
almost
. Right?”

“I also almost got you killed, all because I saw some stupid guy with some other stupid guy before the first stupid guy killed him.” Alison shook her head. “God, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“No,” he agreed as he intertwined their fingers. “It doesn’t. Someone from the FBI was here while you were upstairs. He couldn’t stay and I tried to ask him all the questions I thought you might have, but …”

Alison laughed. “You mean there’re actually answers?”

A.J. shrugged. “I think it depends on the question.”

“The first one,” Alison said, “obviously, is
what
the
what
 …?”

A.J. laughed, which was nice, because even though she was going to be okay, the lines of worry on his face were still much too deep.

“Okay,” he said. “Let me give it a try. Ready?”

“Very,” she told him.

“Once upon a time, there was a crime lord who lived in Los Angeles,” he started, and Alison laughed. And complained.

“I don’t want the fairytale version,” she said. “I want facts—oh, my
God!”

Jamie had popped in—just appearing over by the window, in his full gunfighter’s garb.

“That’s so freaky when you do that,” she told him. “You really need to learn to knock, sir.”

“Jamie?” A.J. asked, and Alison nodded.

Jamie meanwhile was demonstrating his lack of ability when it came to knocking, showing her that his fist went right through the wall.

“How about this?” Alison suggested.
“Knock knock!”

“I could do that,” Jamie agreed. “Although, to be honest, I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be around. Especially with all the new evidence.”

“What new evidence?” she asked, but then looked at A.J., who was sitting there patiently while she had a conversation with the thin air. “Sorry.”

“No,” he said. “And I totally get it now—how strange it looks. But it’s okay. What new evidence?”

“Joey’s flying down,” Jamie told them both, with Alison relaying his words to A.J. “He tracked down a whole pile of birth and death certificates. Oh, and Rose found the title to the house. Both mine and Mel’s names were on that.”

“That’s great,” Alison said. “But we were both thinking about evidence having to do with me nearly getting A.J.’s entire family killed up in Alaska.”

“If you’re going to take the blame,” Jamie told her tartly, “you better be ready to share. Because it was
my
fault, completely, that Brian Bacca came after you. If I’d just walked
away from Wayne’s motor vehicle funeral pyre, none of this would’ve happened.”

Again, Alison repeated his words.

“Not true,” A.J. said. “At least not according to what I’ve been told. Brian Bacca—the man who killed Wayne and shot Alison—he was cleaning up. Anyone who was a potential witness, even fellow thugs like Skip and Gene, were being removed from the maybe-they’ll-turn-state’s-evidence list. Apparently, Brian was methodical. After he was done here, he was going to go after Skip and Gene’s girlfriends, silence them, too. Just in case they knew anything remotely incriminating. I was probably on his list, too.”

“That’s crazy,” Alison said. “And it all started with Brian killing Wayne—why? When I saw them, they were working together to shake down Trace Marcus. Oh, my God—is Trace dead, too?”

A.J. was shaking his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

“I do.” Jamie came up large. “Shh, tell A.J. we need to keep this quiet, but Trace Marcus is in an FBI safe house. He’s the prime witness in the case against Stanley Parker.”

Alison whispered Jamie’s words to A.J., but then asked, “Who’s Stanley Parker?”

“He’s the crime lord,” A.J. told her. “The one who lives in L.A.? Brian Bacca worked for him. He was his right-hand man for over ten years.”

“Seriously?” she said, dismayed. “I was nearly killed on the orders of a
Stanley?”

A.J. laughed again, and a little more of the strain from the past few days left his eyes.

“Apparently, he’s a badass,” A.J. told her, “despite his non-badass name. Brian’s not the only one who worked for him. Skip Smith and Gene Solomon both did, too. Along with the original murder victim, Wayne Cortez.”

“Trace Marcus was connected to Stanley Parker, too,” Jamie chimed in. “Trace owed him a lot of money—to the point that Stanley owned him. It was a symbiotic relationship, though. Stanley provided drugs for him as well as—”

“No, Skip said he was clean,” Alison said. But as soon as
the words left her mouth, she realized how stupid she was to believe anything that Skip Smith had told her.

“Stanley also provided Skip to wrangle Trace,” Jamie told her, “as well as keep him supplied with, yes, both drugs
and
a way to cheat the system when it came to drug tests.”

“Okay,” Alison said, after relaying Jamie’s words to A.J. “Wait. Rewind. I saw Brian and Wayne shaking down Trace, outside of my trailer. And it’s
Wayne
who was killed? Not Trace? I don’t understand.”

“Stanley thought he owned Trace’s soul, but it turns out he misjudged the actor’s malleability,” Jamie said. “The way I understand it is, Trace was supposed to give Stanley a percentage of his paycheck every week, and he’d missed several weeks running. Now, in truth that payment was peanuts compared to how much Trace owed. But the payment was symbolic—a constant reminder to Trace that Stanley was his lord and master. So Stanley had Brian and Wayne come out to Jubilation, to remind Trace who was really in control.”

“But it was a two-birds-with-one-stone thing,” A.J. said after Alison relayed Jamie’s information to him. “Because Wayne Cortez—the man with all the tattoos—had just gotten out of jail, and Stanley apparently believed—correctly—that he’d cut a deal with the feds, and that he was working to help solidify a case against Stanley.”

“That’s right,” Jamie said. “So our buddy Brian Bacca killed old Wayne in front of Trace for two reasons. One, because he wanted to scare the hell out of Trace, and two, because according to Stanley, Wayne needed to be killed.”

“After I saw them with Trace,” Alison remembered, “I heard a car backfire.”

“That would’ve been the gunshot,” A.J. told her.

“With Wayne sans head and Trace properly terrorized, Brian drove his rental car into the desert, where he torched it,” Jamie said. “Wayne wouldn’t have been identified if I hadn’t stumbled onto the fire. But together A.J. and I reported both the fire and the murder, and suddenly you were a potential witness, who could put Stanley Parker’s right-hand man with
a deceased federal informant on the day of that informant’s death.

“But worse than that,” he continued, “you could put the two of them with Trace Marcus, who’d actually witnessed the murder. Stanley believed they could control Trace with drugs and the promise of more drugs, but he knew that if the FBI picked him up for questioning, all bets were off. So you became the target, Alison. And toward the end, when things were getting wildly out of control—you’re a hard woman to kill—Brian was desperately trying to clean up all the loose ends, including Skip and Gene. What he didn’t know, though, was that Trace Marcus had already gone to the FBI, asking for protection in return for information about Stanley Parker.”

“So no hospital visit for an appendectomy,” Alison said.

“Nope,” Jamie said. “But Trace did spend several key days negotiating his immunity before giving the feds the information that would have helped them take the threat against you seriously. If we’re still laying blame, Trace should get a stinking bucket of it thrown in his face.”

This was crazy. “Hugh told me Neil Sylvester is dead, too,” Alison said. “That Skip killed him?”

A.J. nodded. “Neil was involved, too. Stanley loaned him several million dollars that he was going to use to turn Jubilation into a tourist mecca. In return, aside from the low interest rate, Neil was responsible for getting Trace Marcus the role of Silas Quinn. He gave the production company permission to film in Jubilation, provided they cast Stanley’s property, Trace.”

“Neil tried to get out,” Jamie told her, “when the body count started. In fact, the last thing he did before he died was put in a call to Stanley’s private phone number—which is going to be used as evidence in the case. Hey, you know those letters you were waiting for?”

“The ones written by Penelope Eversfield?” Alison asked.

Jamie nodded. “The FBI was going through Neil’s house, and they found them, along with an entire vault of documents that had belonged to Silas Quinn. A marriage certificate that
Mel had signed and, drumroll, please … The missing locket, with that curl of Mel’s hair.”

“DNA evidence,” Alison said.

Jamie nodded. “There’s also information about Quinn’s second wife, Agatha, who was nicknamed Annie. She was only fifteen when the scumbag married her. She was Dick Eversfield’s youngest daughter. And I was right about Quinn being poisoned. Annie and her stepmother, Penelope, did the deed. It’s in the letters. Which Neil was trying to keep from you, along with all of the other stuff, because he didn’t want his great-great-grandfather’s good name ruined.”

“I’ve got to get my hands on those letters,” Alison said, after repeating that information for A.J.

He squeezed her hand. “I’ll help you.”

“I also need your DNA,” she told him.

He smiled at that.

“Not that way,” she said. “I mean, yes, that way, but also …”

“I know,” he said.

They all sat there in silence for a moment, but then Jamie cleared his throat. “Rose, um, asked me to give you a message.”

“Me?” Alison asked. “Or …?”

“You,” Jamie said.

“Can she see you?” Alison asked.

“No,” the ghost said. “But she’s inclined to take it seriously now when Tom tells her I’m in the room.”

“What’s the message?”

“She said she’s going to email you with a whole long list of books and Internet loops and support groups. Both for Al-Anon and family members of Gulf War vets.”

When Alison relayed that to A.J., he was embarrassed. “I’m sorry that she’s so pushy. God,” he said, “we come at you from all sides, don’t we? My mother and … Now I can’t even filter Jamie. God only knows what else he’s been saying to you.”

“He’s not saying anything terrible,” Alison said. “Although he did tell me that story about when you were little
and you forgot to do your homework, so you thought if you went into math class and burst into song, like in a musical, everything would turn out okay.”

“Oh,” A.J. said. “Good. Great.”

“He also told me about the time that mean boy at school fell through the ice, and you were the only one who risked falling in yourself, to save him.”

“It wasn’t that big a deal,” he said.

“As for your mother,” Alison told him, “I asked her for that information. I asked her to … help. Me. It’s been a really long time since I’ve had any kind of a real family to lean on, for anything, and … I think it’s really nice.”

He was surprised—pleasantly. She could see his hope in his eyes.

From over by the window, Jamie spoke up. “Speaking of family, when we were in the mine,” he said, “you promised me great-great-grandchildren.”

Alison looked at him. “I don’t remember saying that.”

“A promise is a promise,” he pointed out.

“But not if it’s made when you’re high from lack of oxygen, mixed with, I don’t know, sheer terror?”

“Fear makes people honest,” he countered.

“Not everyone wants children,” she said.

“But you do.” He was absolute in his conviction.

He was also right.

A.J. was clearly puzzled as he followed only her side of the conversation. Thank God.

But then the nurse was back, knocking on the door as she opened it, saving Alison from an embarrassing explanation.

“Sorry to interrupt,” the nurse said. “I just wanted to give you fair warning. We’ll have a wheelchair in here in about five minutes.”

A.J. frowned. “Where are they taking you now?”

“Back into the labyrinth of doom,” Alison told him. “For another CAT scan. And hey, while I’m gone—I meant to tell you this before—Melody’s diaries. A.J., you need to read them. They’re both heartbreaking and … 
so
inspiring. You were right when you said that the truth was better than the
legend. Melody Gallagher’s my hero, and I’m going to try, every day of my life, to make choices and decisions that she would’ve been proud of. You know, after what she went through with Quinn, she had every reason never to trust another man. Ever. But she did and …” She broke off, shaking her head. “They’re in my lockup. I’ll tell the nurse to give you the key. There’s one entry in particular that … Well, I just think you need to read them all to understand what I’ve … been thinking about.”

“Okay,” he said. But then he asked, “Why do you need another CAT scan?”

“They just want to make sure the swelling is getting better not worse,” she told him. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

A.J. nodded. “And me being worried about you is nothing for
you
to worry about,” he told her quietly.

She took his hand, lifting his poor, battered fingers to her mouth, where she kissed him. “You’re going to have to give me time,” she told him.

“I love you,” A.J. said. “I’ll give you all the time you need.”

“Mr. Gallagher?”

The nurse’s voice woke A.J. from a deep, dreamless sleep.

He was out on the couch in the hospital waiting room. He’d come out here to give Alison privacy when Hugh had visited, and damn, he’d fallen asleep.

It was stupid, because he’d just finished reading Melody’s diaries and he knew exactly what had affected Alison so intensely. He was dying to talk to her about it, but then Hugh had appeared, so A.J. had stepped outside, because it was clear that Hugh wanted to talk to Alison privately. He was, no doubt, making sure that Alison really wanted crazy A.J. hanging around.

A.J. was glad that Alison had friends like Hugh, so he’d gone out into the little waiting area and he’d sat down and made the mistake of closing his eyes. And instead of sleeping for five minutes—he checked the clock on the wall—he’d been unconscious for closer to five
hours
 …? He sat up and
ran his hands down his face, still groggy. “Hugh was supposed to wake me when he left,” he said.