The score from Klein would depend on the footage, and the story I could craft, what I thought I could use to trigger him. If it was meant to be fifty large, could I push it as high as seventy-five? Slip the eight back to the police for the bribe, a couple more to ensure Jackal’s silence, and still pay off the debt. Playing fair, or close to it. The Lady would never know.
I took another sip of the warm night air, pondering it. Outside, the low rumble of the planes overhead set the glass in the window trembling. When I’d first moved to Los Angeles, I’d hated everything about the city, the traffic, the people. Everything. Los Angeles was an endless appetite, ninety-two smaller cities stapled together and consuming everything in its path. Even with my doors locked tight, I could feel the city trying to make its way in—the Santa Anas sweeping through freshly soldered seams, pale afternoon light spilling through blinds zipped shut, the sight of beautiful people on every corner turning you inside out against yourself. In the beginning, living in Los Angeles was like having a constant spotlight shining on you and at the same time like being invisible.
It had taken Lou, and the Lady, and even Jackal, for me to understand that the best part of the city was its artifice. Use the spotlight as a weapon. Wear the con like a coat. That’s when Los Angeles became my city.
Somewhere a cat yowled, and I turned my back on the window. I’d never asked myself—I’d never wanted to ask myself—if there had been other girls before me. I’d never wondered what would happen if I didn’t want the job anymore. How impossible it would be for the Lady to let someone with so much knowledge about her business leave it. It had seemed we could go on indefinitely, the three of us, carrying out the Lady’s orders, making this little corner of the city our own.
Little pinpricks of cold danced down my arms, into my stomach. When I’d been fired from my last job, I’d been sure I’d never put my life back together. But then I’d met Lou—or, rather, Lou had found me. There were other cities in the world, but there weren’t other Lous.
Even if I didn’t close Klein and somehow managed to escape the Lady, I’d have to leave Los Angeles. Maybe even California. I’d have to leave Lou, and Jackal. I’d be back to square one: no references, no work history. Not as Jo. Not as the woman I’d been before Lou and the Lady, either. I’d made something of myself by Lou’s side. If that was gone . . .
I turned off the lights and walked to the cupboard and grabbed a bottle of gin and poured myself a nightcap.
I fell asleep that night on top of my bed, sheets pulled up to my neck, sweating through the cotton. If I had dreams worth remembering, they were ghosts by the time I woke.
Chapter 8
Lou and I were outside Carrigan’s office before noon. She’d picked me up on time, for once, and called me from outside my apartment building chirping, “Let’s go, let’s go!”
Lou, normally, was not a morning person. But the minute she had a whiff of a mark, the whole game changed. When we were on a new case, she had an engine that couldn’t be stopped, and a cheerful, ruthless focus that had led to more than one marathon thirty-two-hour stakeout, me asleep in the car next to her, or else asleep in my bed, fielding phone calls with details on the mark’s bathroom habits. “Possible piss fetish,” she’d say, her voice bright and chirpy at 3 a.m. “Gotta go, I’ll call back when I’m sure.”
On my way to meet her, I passed the pool where kids were slapping pastel-colored noodles against the surface for maximum splash. Management kept the concrete crater filled to the brim with eye-stinging chlorine that tasted of salty, gone-off fruit. A bright blue light at the deepest end kept you from noticing, right away, the scrum ringing the edge, the oil-like sheen the too-still water took on immediately. Instead, that light made it look almost healthy.
After I’d finished my very first case, Lou and I had sat around the pool downing a bottle or six of champagne—“sparkle water,” Lou called it. I’d been so loopy from the bubbles that when Lou made some half-assed joke I’d nearly tumbled into the water, laughing.
“Don’t fall in,” she warned me. “I can’t swim, so I’d have to let you drown.” She looked at the water like an ex-lover.
“It’s only eight feet,” I said, my eyes burning from the chlorine fumes.
“I’d have to let you drown,” she said again, waggling her eyebrows so I was in on the joke, and then she poured me more champagne, finishing the bottle and tossing the glass carcass into the deep end.
The morning fog had turned into a miserable steamy mist that hung in the air like a wet wool blanket. Before I’d managed to buckle the seat belt, Lou stuck a freshly brewed cup of java in my face, and I took a long inhale, groaning in appreciation. It knocked me about halfway toward human.
Lou didn’t drink coffee. She smoked cigarettes (she said they were too tasty to kick, and besides, did you know you put on ten, maybe fifteen pounds once you did?—no thank you), and she drank—with me, mostly. But on the whole, she didn’t tolerate girls who blew shit up their nose, or jammed junk in their arms, and she didn’t even like caffeine, said the stimulants made her skittish. Instead she chewed gum in the mornings, said she thought the minty freshness jump-started her brain. And who was I to say she was wrong?
“So,” Lou said as she braked into the 405 and we settled into the stop-and-go, “Ellen. Is she in love with him or what?”
I’d known it was coming and I’d practiced my answer to minimize Lou’s concern. “Infatuated, maybe. She asked if we wouldn’t mind if she kept seeing him, once it was all over.” It was bad news and Lou would worry, but not as much as if I’d pretended nothing was wrong. And not as much as if I’d told her the truth.
“How big a liability is she?”
“Well, she told me,” I said, hating myself a little for the lie. “So she still trusts me. It’s nothing, I’ve still got her under control. I guess I wanted to tell you, be honest with you.”
“Jo, tell me now if you think you can’t handle—”
“No,” I said, fast. Lou had stuck her neck out for me with the Lady. I’d find a way to handle it. Ellen had her money. She’d be in almost as much trouble as us if she went to the cops. Even just thinking of the cops made me shudder. “It’s a little crush, nothing to worry about. I shouldn’t have even mentioned it.”
Lou looked at me from the side of her eye, not turning her head. I held my breath. But she didn’t push it any further.
Carrigan’s office took up three high-rise floors in an Art Deco jewel box of a skyscraper that was located in the apocalypse of downtown. On the forty-minute ride, I had time to fill Lou in on what I’d learned so far about Carrigan.
His favorite movies starred Humphrey Bogart. He’d grown up in Wisconsin. He’d been the college quarterback. Married to Tana Carrigan, Philanthropist and Wife. Not a bad-looking woman at all, more handsome than beautiful, with a square chin, and despite her evident Botox, she still looked mostly human. She was also seven years older than her husband, which I suspected might have something to do with the fervent upkeep.