Hard Exit, page 24
“More than two years, every chance we got,” Mike said.
I wanted to yell, wanted to slug him, wanted him to reach for his gun so I could outdraw him and wipe the smirk off his face. Instead, I shook my head and inhaled and exhaled deeply four times, trying to calm down.
“How’d you know?”
“The Amex she used to cut the blow in the bathroom. It was yours.”
“Shit. I must have hers. We weren’t exactly of sound mind after inhaling a mountain of Medellín’s finest and a trough of Maker’s Mark. Not sure how we made it home from Loews.”
I didn’t know what to say. Mike had taken the deaths of his father and his sister, Michelle, very hard, and I’d worried often about his drinking. I’d always thought he burned too hot, pursuing his passions—sports, bourbon, and women—too fervently, letting his blind enthusiasm throw him off balance. But I never thought he’d lose himself so much that he’d order a murder, if not become a murderer himself. Addiction warps reality to whatever extent allows an addict to down the next drink, to snort the next line, or to shoot the next dose. My father had proven that—and was still proving it, which was why he wasn’t in my life.
I looked at Mike, expecting to see sadness or self-loathing. Or maybe he’d be apologetic. But what I saw was contempt. His expression told me he was spoiling for a fight. I hoped I was wrong but readied my right hand in case I had to reach for the Beretta.
“Took you long enough. Hell of a detective you are.” He laughed loudly.
“Why, Mike? Why would you do this to Amanda and me? She’s a vulnerable addict, and I thought I was among your best friends.”
“Why does anyone do anything, Jack?”
A heavy-set, thirtyish Latino security guard wearing a gray uniform walked across the lobby toward us. The nametag affixed to his left breast read: Luis. He didn’t appear to be armed.
“You gentlemen mind taking this conversation elsewhere?” Luis asked, although he was telling us to move, not asking.
“No problem,” I said. “Amanda has probably finished eating. Should the three of us talk somewhere?” I asked Mike.
“Nothing more to say.” He stood.
“Gentlemen?” Luis said.
“You didn’t answer my question. Why’d you do it?”
I looked to my right, past Mike, who was facing me, and saw Amanda watching us from the edge of the lobby. She waved at me but didn’t move toward us. I didn’t respond because I wanted to hear what Mike would say about them when he didn’t know she could hear him.
“She was there, and you were clueless. Your head’s in the sand, man, in love with an ideal. Jami was impressive, true, but she was still human, still flawed. Even if she’d been perfect, she’s gone. You never moved on, and Amanda was attractive and willing. I’ve never needed more than that.”
“That’s it,” Luis said. “I’m asking you both to leave.” He took hold of Mike’s right elbow with his left hand. Mike threw his arm in the air, forcing Luis to let go. Mike stepped away and swept the right side of his jacket back, revealing his gun. Mike and I both heard Amanda gasp. He turned toward her for a few seconds. I removed the Beretta from its holster and leveled it at him. The receptionist ran from behind the counter and stood next to Amanda, about thirty feet away from me. Ten people were now fanned out around Amanda. Mike, still holding his jacket back, took his eyes off her and looked at Luis.
“Relax, sir,” Luis said. “No need for that. Calm down, or I can call the sheriff if you’d like.”
Mike laughed and glanced at me. He saw my gun aimed at him. “Yeah, we could do it that way, Jack. Sure. A blaze of glory. Or I guess it would be gory. A blaze of gory. It would make the papers, CNN.” He laughed again, louder this time, with the sound transforming from laughter to a howl. “But that doesn’t feel right. I’m gonna set my gun down slowly, like this.”
He removed the blued revolver from its holster and set it on the floor next to his right foot. Luis took two steps toward Mike and picked up the gun. I was about to re-holster mine but thought doing so wasn’t worth the risk. Mike was a great athlete and very quick, so I only lowered the gun, then said, “Call off the attack, Mike.”
He smiled, and for a few seconds I saw the friend I’d known and loved for decades. Mike was still there somewhere, albeit addled by coke and bourbon.
“Maybe your head’s not as far in the sand as I thought,” he said. “I wouldn’t have sent Game with you if I’d known you were suddenly going to re-enter the world of the living. Shit, your cluelessness was why I sent him. I knew he wasn’t in a gang. I mean, look at the kid. His tough-guy act is ridiculous. I had to bite my tongue to stop from laughing at it. He got an A in my class. Bangers don’t bother to show up, let alone study hard and ace their tests. If they show up, it’s to socialize, not learn. I needed him out of the way so Rachelle and I could spend a whole night together. It’s absurd how she dotes on him, not willing to leave a sixteen-year-old alone at home. The park shooting was the perfect excuse. Mama trying to protect her son, the so-called banger. I didn’t have to work hard to convince her. And you? Shit. You’ve been a pushover for years. But here we are now, with you afraid you’ll shoot me and me afraid you won’t.”
“Call off the attack.”
“Okay. You win.” He pulled his iPhone from his jeans and scrolled through his contacts. “Clever Jack Drake, rope-a-doping us for a decade, only to deliver the knockout in the late rounds. Bravo.” He tapped out a text and sent it.
“Done,” he said. “I can’t vouch for Milford or Titan, but they won’t get help from da Posse when they come for you.”
“Milford shot Titan. Game caught it on video.”
“Shit. Didn’t think he had it in him. Marty pulling a trigger? Wow. Guess you probably won’t need this, but just in case.” He handed me his phone. “Pass code’s 1207, Michelle’s birthday. In the Voice Memos app, you’ll find enough to put Milford away.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking his phone and putting it in my windbreaker.
He nodded, turned, and walked to Amanda. He opened his arms wide to hug her, and she put her arms around him, inside his jacket. He whispered in her ear as she put her head on his shoulder. I waved my arm to get Luis’ attention. He saw me, nodded, and walked over to Mike and Amanda.
“Okay, we’re done. Hand it to me, Ms. Bigelow.”
“What? What are you talking about?” she asked, removing her arms from Mike’s jacket and bringing them behind her back. She threw a Baggie of coke behind her. It hit a female patient in the leg and fell to the floor. Luis shouldered Mike out of the way and held Amanda at arm’s length as he bent to pick up the Baggie. He turned to Mike and said, “You give me no choice, sir. If you leave now, you might miss the sheriff.”
Mike looked at Luis and Amanda and bowed deeply, flourishing his right arm upward, then sweeping it in an arc toward the ground. He turned, walked toward me, and opened his arms for a hug. I thought he might make a play for my gun, so I held it tightly in my right hand, then wrapped that arm around his left shoulder as he embraced me.
He asked, “Did I ever tell you I was one of the Fruit of the Loom guys?”
“Nope.”
“Yup, the purple grapes. The pinnacle of my acting career.”
“Impressive,” I said.
He let go, stepped back, and looked in my eyes.
“Take care of yourself,” he said. “And Jennifer. I’m truly happy for you both.”
“I will.”
“And I’m sorry. Really.”
“I know you are. I forgive you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
But I haven’t forgiven him. Not for most of what he did—although I’m trying.
After Mike left Malibu Serenity that night, the director of the facility and Luis escorted Amanda to her room and watched her pack. Apparently, receiving smuggled cocaine while in rehab was against the rules. While she was upstairs, I unlocked Mike’s phone and listened to the two recordings Mike had made of Marty Milford giving him instructions.
The first one said: “I carried Chris from the beginning. He and I both know that, and everyone else in the business suspects it. He’s good with people, fine. So are hostesses and hookers. He couldn’t organize a garage sale, but he’s gonna threaten me? Gonna turn me in? Really? Fuck him. Two pictures in a row he championed, just had to do ’em. But they tanked. Total flops. But he’s gonna tell me how I can make my money? What are we, nuns? I need you to take care of this. I want him dead, now.”
How could Mike have gone through with the order? He’d calmed me down when I was drunk and wanted to attack the cop who’d pulled us over after we’d learned of Jami’s bike accident. Mike had been the voice of reason that day. How had that man turned into this one? How long had coke been hobbling him while I’d wallowed in self-pity, not noticing his pain and addiction?
I played the second recording: “The old, fat slob thinks he can get away with that? He can ruin me? Really? Is he threatening me or shaking me down? What the hell? The guy’d be homeless if it weren’t for me. Screw him and his dying wife. He invented a kayak. Yippee. I saved his business and found a way to do some real business. Take him out. Chris brought no heat. Do it the same way. Sad old guys off themselves all the time.”
I forwarded both recordings to the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station. I sent the second one to Frank, along with a text that said: The video should be enough, but this could help land Milford on death row.
I had no choice that night but to drive Amanda to her fifth rehab in Malibu, called Moonlight. As we drove down from the top of Latigo Canyon, where Malibu Serenity was located, toward PCH, I asked her, “When did you start using again?”
“I’m sorry, Jack, I really am, but I never really stopped. Maybe for a couple weeks after the last one, but I ran into Jason at Ralphs. We talked about our latest projects, and he looked loaded, so I asked if he had any left. None on him. He’d just snorted the last of it in the Ralphs bathroom. But he made a phone call, and we sat in Starbucks and talked, and in like an hour, Mike shows up. I was surprised, but nothing in this town surprises anyone, does it? I mean, really? Look at Weinstein and Cosby and Michael Jackson and Robert Blake. Shit, what’s his name? Specter. So, I was surprised but I wasn’t. Mike had always flirted hard with me, but I thought we were just having fun. He’s your friend, so I thought we were flirting. When Jason finally left our room in the Malibu Beach Inn, loaded to the gills, Mike made it clear he wasn’t just flirting. It started that night. Mike and I actually get each other, but I don’t expect you to believe that.”
“Apparently, I’ll believe anything.”
We drove in silence down Latigo. When I saw the firetruck, ambulance, and two sheriff’s patrol cars near the edge of the road where it turns sharply left, I knew what had happened. I didn’t have to look down the cliff to know a convertible Corvette Stingray was at the bottom. When Mike handed me his phone, instead of forwarding the recordings to me, we were saying our final goodbyes.
“What happened?” Amanda asked as we passed the emergency vehicles.
“Someone missed the turn. Probably distracted.”
She didn’t find out about the accident for a couple days when a fellow Moonlight patient, a car buff, mentioned that he’d seen a picture of the destroyed Vette on the news. “It had a vanity plate,” he said while eating dinner with the other patients, she told me when I visited her. “What does LOOM mean?” the patient had asked.
But Mike wasn’t at the bottom of the canyon. I knew it as I drove by the scene. He was a fighter to his core, so he would never surrender. He would exhaust every option and wouldn’t quit. He wanted me and everyone else to think he’d been thrown from the open convertible as it plunged hundreds of feet over the cliff, hurling his body into unreachable terrain or high in a tree that clung to a treacherous slope.
The next day’s Los Angeles Times quoted a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s press liaison as saying: “For the safety of the search and rescue teams searching for Mike Sherwood, a beloved English teacher at Oakville High School, the search was suspended because of darkness and the difficulty the terrain presents to the dedicated team searching for him. We’ll begin again in the morning. We feel confident Mr. Sherwood will turn up.”
Yes, Mr. Sherwood turned up, intact and unscathed physically but still jacked on cocaine.
Before he handed me his phone at Serenity, he forgot to delete his texting history. His oversight was understandable, considering I’d been pointing a gun at him. While Amanda packed, after I’d listened to the recordings of Milford telling Mike to kill Chris and Big Bill, I looked at the texts Mike had recently sent. The last one, the one in which he was supposed to call off Alphonse and Deion, said: It’s a go. If I ain’t there, go without me. Good luck. The one before that was to Amanda and said: On my way, baby, with everything you need.
My visit to Serenity had confirmed that Mike and Amanda were together and he was complicit in everything that had happened. But I’d hoped my visit would allow me to call off the plan that Jen, Game, Kenny, and I had put in place during our long talk in the motel. Mike’s faked suicide was meant to get law enforcement to stop pursuing him for the murders and to pin them on Milford, but Mike’s plan was also meant to get me to let my guard down. If I believed Mike and Titan were dead and Alphonse and Deion had been called off, no one would be left to come after me because Milford was on the run and Kenny had turned himself in, although Mike wouldn’t have known that. He did know, however, that Kenny wouldn’t have acted alone. With no one left, I would scrap the plan to defend ourselves, Mike was hoping. He’d given me the phone to get me to believe he would kill himself, to believe he was getting rid of his possessions and doing the right thing by providing evidence that would lock Milford up.
But his inability to act not only cost him his acting career, but it also tipped me off to his plan. When he’d made that showy bow, flourishing his right arm upward, then sweeping it toward the ground, as if he were a dandy on an Elizabethan stage, I knew the gesture felt wrong. At first, I thought the mountain of coke he’d consumed had influenced his elaborate choreography, but when he hugged me and mentioned Fruit of the Loom, instead of expressing contrition or regret, I knew he was playing a role. Poorly.
He wanted me to think he was about to kill himself, but I’d been on that ledge, and his emotions were wrong. While standing at the brink, considering whether to step into darkness forever, he should have been looking inward—his self-loathing and guilt should have been eating him up, devouring whichever positive traits he possessed, allowing him to see only the worst of himself and the world. But he chose to make two external gestures—the first a flourish for everyone in the room, and the second an inside joke to me.
After I left Amanda at Moonlight, I made a few calls to confirm our plan was still on.
I drove to Jen’s house, parked in the driveway, and went inside. We turned on the lights that were usually on in the evening, then slipped out the back. We walked on the wet sand to Amanda’s. I knew Amanda was too far gone to have changed the security code or changed the locks. If she wanted to try to get me charged with trespassing when she got out of rehab, good luck to her.
For however long it took for the attackers to arrive, Jen was supposed to manipulate the lights, stereo, and televisions in her house with her phone via Apple Homekit while she stood on the sand. She was supposed to live like a mouse in Amanda’s house, providing no indication that anyone was home. After Game had dropped off the BMW, Frank had driven him to Oakville, where he broke the news to his mother about Mike being a drug dealer and complicit in at least three murders.
I’d turned the eight-kilos of cocaine over to the sheriff, making law enforcement agencies eager to cooperate with us. They greenlighted the parts of my plan that met with their objectives and nixed those that didn’t. Two deputies and three DEA agents entered Jen’s house from the sand and made themselves disappear throughout the four stories.
Although I cooperated with law enforcement, I didn’t tell them everything. While they waited for Alphonse, Deion, and whichever other Posse members would arrive to kill me and anyone with me, the deputies and agents didn’t know I wouldn’t be with Jen at Amanda’s, as the plan specified.
My gut had exposed the smuggling ring and helped to gather enough evidence to convict Marty Milford. So, when my gut told me that Mike hadn’t driven off the cliff and wouldn’t participate in the attack on me, I listened to it and knew it was up to me to catch him.
From the moment I passed the emergency vehicles parked on Latigo, I wondered how I would fake my death, if I had to. No one could fake his own death spontaneously and hope to get away with it, so Mike would have needed a plan, one that included plenty of money to help him escape and live a long time without an honest source of income. He couldn’t make a bank withdrawal after he’d supposedly launched himself into the void. He’d need a sizeable go-bag—filled with cash, clothes, food, falsified documents, and anything else necessary to assume a new identity, probably in another country that didn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States. And he’d have to stash the go-bag somewhere accessible enough to grab it at any hour. But it would have to be hidden well enough so that no one else could find it. His world would end if he needed to disappear but his go-bag had been stolen.
Where would he hide it? Not at his house. And he couldn’t risk that Game or Rachelle would find it at their house. U.S. train stations and bus stations almost never have lockers anymore because terrorists could use them to store explosives for an attack. Gyms have cameras in them and aren’t all twenty-four hours, so their lockers wouldn’t be ideal, and safe-deposit boxes were out. He could bury a bag anywhere, but the land would have to be accessible twenty-four-seven, and could he afford to spend time digging it up while being chased?
