Or She Dies Read online

  The doors were locked and bolted, the burglar alarm set. The day’s bouts of street theater had left the paparazzi reinvigorated, sipping coffee from thermoses, patrolling the block, and comparing lenses beyond the curb. A news helicopter had returned to circle our roof, waiting for another meltdown. The bag of shredded documents sat on the kitchen counter, beside the hard drive I’d tugged from Ridgeline’s copier. The revolver rested at arm’s length on the coffee table. Gable and RHD were using all resources to shore up the case against me; they didn’t even have to waste manpower keeping surveillance on me, since the press was doing the job for them. The men from Ridgeline — DeWitt and Verrone and whoever else — were out there somewhere in the night, plotting. And Ari and I were sitting on the couch, facing each other, our bent legs intertwined.

  I ran my fingertips across her mouth, her neck, each living part of her. I held my knuckles before her trembling lips and felt the rush of her breath. I marveled at her coloring, pressed on her skin and watched pink fill in the white, as if this evidence of her moving blood could wipe from my memory the image of her face against the weeds, the shade of her flesh Photoshopped to an unliving gray.

  Leaning forward, she kissed me, tentatively. A nervous whisper — ‘Still remember how to have sex?’ Her mouth was at my ear, her hair brushing my bruised cheek.

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘You?’

  She pulled away, rolling her lips as if still assessing the feel of my mouth. ‘I don’t know.’

  She rose and walked up the stairs. A moment later I picked up the revolver and followed.

  We met in a collection of present-tense flashes, a bedroom mosaic. The sheets, shoved back under her impatient heel. The feather-soft grasp of her hand. Her mouth, wet and exploratory against my collarbone. I insisted on seeing every part of her — the mole at the curve of her hip, the arch of her foot, the V of fine blonde hair on her nape beneath the weight of her curls.

  After, or in between, we lay exhausted, interwoven, tracing drops of sweat across each other’s skin. We hadn’t been naked in front of each other in months, and it was all the excitement of the new with the comfort of the familiar. The tendon at the back of her knee was firm and fragile against my lips. The revolver remained beside the jammer on the nightstand, poking into view, never forgotten, but our bedroom had become a sanctuary of sorts, keeping the night and the terrors it held at bay. A trail of clothes led from door to bed. The UCLA hoodie she’d bought at the Student Union and cut thumbholes in the sleeves for the cold early mornings I’d walk her back to her dorm. The Morro Bay T-shirt we’d gotten when we’d gone up to feed the squirrels and stayed in a flea-bitten place we’d renamed The Horsefly Inn. Pulled inside out, her varnish-stained jeans. And dropped into the nest of a fallen pillow on the floor, her wedding set. If ever a string of objects charted a relationship.

  My ear was flat against the back of her thigh, and I could hear the hum of her voice through her flesh. ‘I missed you,’ she said.

  I soaked in the warmth of her skin. I said, ‘I feel like I found you again.’

  Chapter 49

  Burned adrenaline kept me up almost to daylight, before my vigilance finally gave out beneath the weight of so many sleepless nights. I slumbered — dreamless, solid, untroubled — as I hadn’t since my teenage years. When I awakened, the revolver was missing from the nightstand, but I heard Ariana’s familiar footsteps moving around in the kitchen. By the time I finally hauled myself out of bed, popped four ibuprofen, and slumped downstairs, it was nearly two o’clock.

  The gun and jammer resting beside her, she sat cross-legged on the family-room carpet, facing away, scrutinizing a mound of shredded paper from the bag I’d stolen from Ridgeline. No scrap was bigger than a thumbnail. As I neared, I saw that she’d made a few preliminary piles, organized by color. Her biggest collection, with maybe ten pieces, was dwarfed by the unsorted heap, but she seemed characteristically undaunted.

  ‘We’re pretty much fucked on white,’ she said as I walked up behind her. ‘There seems to be slightly less gray. Sparse pink, but I think it’s a take-out menu. And a few of these harder ones. Weird.’ She held a white-silver square over her head, and I took it, bent it between thumb and forefinger. It bowed, regained its shape.

  ‘Magazine cover?’ I ventured.

  ‘No writing on the few I’ve found.’ She leaned back into my legs and looked up at me. A mariposa tucked behind her ear.

  Lavender.

  ‘You haven’t—’ I stopped.

  She raised a hand self-consciously to the flower. ‘You noticed? That I’d stopped wearing this color?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She didn’t smile, but she looked pleased. She went back to sorting through the mound of scraps.

  ‘Is there any hope of piecing something together out of all that?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably not. But it’s one of two leads you took from there. They pulled out all stops to get that missing CD — maybe something here’ll lead us to it. Are you going back to Starbright Plaza? To ask about the lease or whatever?’

  ‘I’m not leaving you. You just died.’

  ‘Patrick, we’re not gonna get out of this if we hole up here. What are we gonna do? Hold each other until Robbery-Homicide kicks down the door?’

  I didn’t want to confess that after the grueling past twenty-four hours, that was pretty much my plan. The notion of being apart from her right now was excruciating. ‘There’s no point in my going to Starbright Plaza,’ I said. ‘We both know how that’ll end up. They’ll have covered all their bases. If I try to get the cops to check it out, I’ll only wind up looking more delusional. Besides, I already took anything useful out of there.’ I glanced at the hard drive, still on the counter. ‘Which reminds me, I need to call around and see which shops have that model of Sharp copier.’

  ‘There are two at the Kinko’s down the hill,’ she said. ‘The one on Ventura. You might be familiar with it.’

  I stared at her, slack-jawed. ‘You are a whirlwind of competence. ’

  ‘Yeah, well, I didn’t have to sleep off a stun grenade like some people.’ The phone rang. ‘That’d be Julianne. She’s been calling all day.’

  ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’

  ‘I tried. But like I said, you were inanimate.’

  I grabbed the phone.

  ‘Hey.’ Julianne’s voice was rushed, intense. ‘I need to get those papers you’re handing off to the professor taking over your classes. It’s urgent.’

  I started to respond, then caught myself. She already knew that I’d handed those papers over to the department chair on the day before yesterday. So what was she signaling to me?

  ‘Okay,’ I said carefully. ‘I would drop them off now, but I—’

  ‘I’m afraid that wouldn’t work anyway. I have to go to Marcello’s nephew’s birthday party at Coldwater Canyon Park at three.’

  Marcello was an only child. No nephew, no party. Julianne was trying to set a meeting with me?

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow, and we’ll pick a time then.’

  Before I could figure out how to tell Julianne that I didn’t want to leave the house, she hung up.

  Ariana asked, ‘What’s up?’

  ‘She wants me to meet her at Coldwater Canyon Park.’ I checked my watch. ‘Right now. She’s been looking into the Ridgeline-sonar connection for me.’

  ‘So you’re going?’

  I hedged.

  ‘Patrick’ — the stern tone now — ’I know you don’t want to leave, and I can’t stand the thought of being away from you either right now, but if we’re gonna have a shot at saving ourselves, we’ve got to go on the offensive. We have too much to handle right now. We need to split up and get it done.’ A nod to the mound of scraps. ‘I’ve got plenty of work ahead of me. Sorting this. Hiring you a lawyer. I’ll stay here. I have the burglar alarm. And this.’ She patted the revolver.

  ‘I thought you didn’t know how to shoot a gun.’
>
  She took in my battered face. ‘I’ll learn.’

  Hearing her say it gutted me.

  I said, ‘They have guns, too, which they already know how to use. Plus, they know how to bypass the alarm system.’

  ‘Right. But they can’t bypass this.’ She beckoned me into the living room and threw open the curtains. The paparazzi and reporters at the curb stumbled into motion. She waved at the flurry of lenses, then tugged the curtains shut. ‘Now. What’s the deal with Julianne?’

  ‘Sounds like she has something,’ I admitted.

  ‘What are you hoping for?’

  ‘Something undeniable. If I can get my hands on concrete evidence, I bet I can get Sally Richards back into it with me.’

  ‘She told you pretty clearly she’s done.’

  ‘But there’s no condition,’ I quoted, ‘more motivating to her than curiosity.’

  ‘Pot, I’d like you to meet kettle.’

  ‘I just need to give her a good enough excuse.’

  ‘Your car’s still at Keith Conner’s, right? You need to take the pickup?’ Her expression was fierce, uncompromising.

  She was right. We had to attack this on two fronts.

  I took a deep breath. ‘I can’t take the pickup,’ I said. ‘The paparazzi will be all over me the minute I leave the driveway. I need to drive something more . . . anonymous.’

  ‘So borrow my license plates.’

  ‘And do what? Screw them onto the stolen BMW?’ I laughed, then saw she was serious. ‘I’m sure the lawyer we haven’t hired will be thrilled.’

  She pointed. ‘Now, go.’

  I pocketed the copier’s hard drive, headed to the garage, and unscrewed her license plates. Then I came back in, took two of the new prepaid cell phones, and programmed each number into the other so she and I would have a way to talk on a secure line. Hers I left on the counter. Taking a deep breath, I walked over, kissed the top of her head, and started for the rear door.

  Without looking up from her sorting, she said, ‘They’re back there, too. The stalkarazzi. Surround-sound protection.’

  ‘Can you create a diversion out front? Get them running to you?’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll flash them. It’ll bring back my sorority days.’

  ‘You weren’t in a sorority.’

  ‘Yeah, but I always feel like I missed out.’ She stood, dusted paper squares from her hands, and in the gold morning light I could see that her fingers were trembling. Her tone, I realized, was less breezy than defiant; she was as fearful as I was of whatever was hurtling toward us. She caught me looking, shoved her hands in her pockets.

  She drew in a breath, held it. ‘Last night was the beginning for us, not the end,’ she said. ‘So you be goddamned careful.’

  The playground, on a green plot perched off intersecting canyon roads, had all the earmarks of Beverly Hills. Restaurant-packaged picnic lunches with sparkling French lemonade. Upmarket climbing apparatuses polished to a high gleam. The lone TV star with windshield-size sunglasses and a street-cred Yankees beanie, tailing a toddler and mustering up the occasional blip of feigned interest. Beautiful second wives tending newborns, the babies resembling their ugly fathers who hovered away from the sand and the concrete turtles, aggressively uninvolved, dressed in Rodeo Drive silk, reeking of cologne, poking at iPhones or yammering into earpieces, their hairlines moving one way, their waistlines another. The mothers bunched and chatted, but the husbands stood apart, lords of their own fiefdoms, their sagging eyes betraying more buyer’s remorse than could penetrate the nip-and-tuck surface tension of their wives’ frozen expressions of contentedness.

  Julianne had chosen the park, I guessed, because everyone was famous here, or at least they all fancied themselves so. Introductions were gauche — either they knew who you were or you weren’t worth knowing. Patrick Davis, in his newfound infamy and Red Sox cap, might pass unscrutinized here.

  Julianne was lingering over by the swings like a spinster aunt left out at the family reunion. I parked my appropriated car, the Beemer with conveniently tinted windows, and started to get out, but my hand froze on the door handle. Gripped by a spasm of justified paranoia, I looked up the street at all the vehicles and passersby, then stayed put. I dialed.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked after I explained.

  ‘I’m at your nine o’clock. Turn, turn. Here.’

  ‘The Beemer?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Nice rims, Coolio. Care to fill me in?’

  ‘It’d take too long. I owe you a big catch-up at the end of this, if I’m still standing.’

  ‘You’ll owe me more than that. I spoke with my hook at the Wash Post. One of his colleagues has specialized in uncovering all this stuff since Clinton signed the rendition directive in ’95.’

  ‘Wait a minute. All what stuff?’

  ‘Ridgeline is based in Bahrain.’ She paused, reading my silence. ‘I know. Given that “Ridgeline” doesn’t exactly have an Arabic ring, I’m assuming the company is Western, but they wanted to set up as a nonreporting entity for maximum secrecy. They specialize in international executive protection.’

  The car interior was suddenly too warm. I tugged at my shirt, fanning it. ‘What’s a corporation like that doing in a strip mall in Studio City?’

  ‘Ridgeline’s bodyguard business is a front for a shadow operation. Any money they’re paid is untraceable once it hits Bahrain, so no one can untangle how much they get for doing what. Plus, they’re hidden behind a mess of holding companies and shell corps. But once you cut through the veils, it becomes clear that Ridgeline was formed mainly to service one client: Festman Gruber.’

  Julianne paced around the swings, taking up her burgundy hair in the back with a restless hand. A family unloaded from a Porsche Cayenne in front of me, the youngest girl fiddling with a fake plastic cell phone. Her older sister snatched it away. ‘It’s not a toy.’

  I said weakly, ‘I’m not familiar with Festman Gruber.’

  ‘Oh, they’re just a seventy-billion-dollar global defense and technology company. And yes, that’s a b. These are the kinds of guys you outsource a war to. I’m guessing they’re the only type of operation, aside from one of our agencies or someone else’s, that could make the moves against you that’ve been made. This rings all the right bells.’

  ‘Or the wrong ones.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘What do they specialize in?’

  ‘Surveillance equipment, obviously. And also—’

  ‘Sonar.’

  She stopped pacing. Beside her, a just-deserted swing bucked on its chains. ‘Bingo.’

  I could see her mouth shaping the word, her voice transmitting on a half-second delay. It struck me as ridiculous that I was reduced to hiding here in a car thirty yards away rather than talking to her face-to-face.

  Her hand went to her back pocket, and then she was thumbing through her notepad. ‘Festman’s based in Alexandria.’

  I thought of that package I’d stolen containing the CD, sent from a FedEx center in Alexandria. And the affixed note: Going dark. Do not contact.

  ‘Going dark’? A Ridgeline operative, inside Festman Gruber? Why would they have a spy inside the company that employed them? The motive, I realized, was written right on that FedEx slip: Insurance.

  Abruptly it all made sense. Ridgeline was a cutout group hired under legit cover to do Festman Gruber’s dirty work — killing Keith, which killed the movie that threatened Festman’s financial interests. Ridgeline’s main job was to frame me for Keith’s murder so all fingers pointed at me and not at Festman Gruber. But once I’d squirmed out of the arrest, Ridgeline had wanted a little insurance of their own, some leverage in case things went south and Festman hung them out. They’d managed to infiltrate Festman or bribe someone inside to FedEx them whatever dirty secrets were hidden on that seemingly blank CD. That’s why Ridgeline was desperate to recover the CD — to hold onto their leverage and to keep Festman from discovering
the betrayal.

  If Ridgeline still hadn’t recovered the disc — and assuming Festman Gruber didn’t know about it yet — then who the hell had broken in to our house and taken it?

  Julianne was still talking. I said, ‘I’m sorry, what?’

  ‘I said, Festman’s based in Alexandria. But they have a satellite office here in Long Beach. Obviously they have operations on both coasts.’

  ‘Why obviously?’

  ‘Uh, sonar?’

  ‘Right, the ocean.’

  ‘Both of them. They conduct biannual RIMPAC — Rim of the Pacific — exercises, and a lot of the tech development’s housed out here, too. But they’ve got reach everywhere.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘It seems their critics have a higher-than-normal mortality rate. An outspoken environmental activist had a hiking accident two summers ago in Alaska, fell off a cliff. An investigative journalist in Chicago committed questionable suicide. That kind of stuff. Festman was under some pretty intense scrutiny a few years back.’

  ‘So they couldn’t have another mysterious death on the books. Like, say, that of a celebrity starring in a documentary about the damages caused by their sonar system.’

  ‘Thus the need for Patrick Davis, fall guy. I mean, given how things went down, who the hell would connect Keith Conner’s murder with a fucking naval-technology company? But if there’s not you at the scene wielding your own bloody golf club—’

  ‘I wasn’t wielding it.’

  ‘Whatever. Without you there panting over the body, then maybe people start raising questions, fitting Keith into a pattern of murders that have proven convenient for Festman.’ She blew out a long breath, puffing her cheeks. ‘I think it’s safe to say Ridgeline and Festman have enjoyed a fruitful relationship for a while now.’

  The thought of that FedEx package brought me some solace. That fruitful relationship was growing strained, Ridgeline taking countermeasures against their employer. As fearsome as my enemies were, at least now I knew where the cracks in the alliance were. The CD, wherever it was, was the holy grail for all of us.