Fire with Fire, page 7
“Was it a one-shot?”
“Lamb.”
“That sample. The Delaneys said it was the only … Can it be replicated? Is there evidence still in holding somewhere? Or is it over now? Did they just … did they just—”
“They just fucked that case.” Charlie nodded, pushing harder. “So we have to get moving. We have two hours before they do it again.”
“How did they get that list?” Lamb looked over her shoulder at the hive of activity now buzzing under the tent. “Did they destroy one of the one-shots on purpose? How did they know that was the one and only sample from that case?”
“Not our problem,” Charlie said. “Our problem is not getting caught up in that traffic snarl on our way out of here.”
He pointed to the gates, to a queue of police and press vehicles blocking the road out of the parking lot. Lamb felt tingles of exhilaration rush over her skin as Charlie walked to the passenger side of the Kia. She climbed into the driver’s side and turned on the car.
For the first ten minutes of the drive west and then north out of the pandemonium of the Cal State grounds and onto the 405, Lamb gripped the wheel and listened as hard as she could to the calls Charlie was making on his little burner phone. They didn’t reveal much to the casual eavesdropper. Mostly, he called, relied on the receiver to recognize his voice, and asked if they’d done “that thing” he’d asked them to do. She assumed he was sending requests in the text messages he typed out between the calls, then going down the list after a few minutes, checking that what he wanted done had been done. When all the mysterious organization was apparently complete, he pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the backpack he’d brought from the hospital and sat back, smoking and watching the city go by.
Lamb hadn’t felt so completely buzzed since the long walk from the Van Nuys station after her catastrophic first morning on the job. It seemed as if there were a thousand things she needed to do right now just to maintain her fingernail grip on Charlie Hoskins and the possibility that he would help her get back into the LAPD, but she didn’t know what any of those things were. She was painfully aware that his next command might be for her to drop him at the foot of the rocky cliffs that surrounded them, or at the gas station they passed turning onto the 101 from the 405, or at a diner, and then he could simply walk away, and there was nothing she could do to stop him. Lamb couldn’t cling to him forever like a desperate mollusk on a slippery rock, and without him she would be back exactly where she was on the fateful morning two days earlier when she’d learned that she had almost killed him: flailing wildly for what or who to cling to next.
On the Hollywood Freeway, still following his barely audible muttered directions while he scrolled through texts on his phone, she spoke up.
“Maybe it was just an unlucky guess,” she said. “They said they knew that was a one-shot, but maybe that’s because they have some kind of other insider information. Maybe they know an officer who worked on it. Maybe they don’t know which samples are one-shots and which aren’t, and they’ll burn a few more, but they’ll be recoverable. The detectives in charge of those cases—they’ll just send the evidence for retesting after the siege is over, and everything will be fine.”
“If you’re going to display that level of optimism for the rest of the day, Lamb, we’re going to have problems,” Charlie said.
“Do you have samples in the lab?” she asked.
Charlie didn’t answer.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going or what?”
“You don’t need to know that right now.”
“Yes, I do. I need to know everything we’re planning, because I want to keep us safe, and I want to contribute.” She looked over at him as the traffic slowed to a standstill. “Are we going to try to find out what happened to Tilly Delaney?”
“We are,” Charlie said.
Lamb choked back an excited yelp, came out with a strangled cough instead.
“Or, at least, I am.”
Lamb inhaled unsteadily.
“You’re along for the ride until you figure out that this situation is just too dangerous for you, which I’m frankly amazed hasn’t happened yet,” Charlie said. “Unless you missed that little bang-bang game we played with the Death Machines only minutes ago.”
“You mean the one where I saved your ass? That game?” Lamb asked.
Charlie ignored her. “If we’re lucky, you might instead just wake up to the fact that this whole job isn’t for you,” he said.
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not.”
She shook her head. “I want to be a police officer, Charlie.”
“Why?”
“Because—”
“No, wait. Let me guess.” Charlie smiled, watched the traffic ahead of them, the wide, sunbaked highway leading down toward the studios. “Somebody made your life a nightmare in high school, and now you’re out to even the score with society’s jocks and mean girls.”
“No,” Lamb said.
“Your dad was a cop.”
“No.”
“A loved one was murdered. Cousin. Grandparent. Sister. It never got solved, and you swore to avenge them.”
“No.”
“You grew up in a crappy neighborhood and dream of going back there and cleaning it up.”
“Where are you getting all this stuff?”
“It’s the uniforms.” He nodded knowingly. He was slumped in the seat now, an elbow on the sill of the open window, his phone in his lap and his eyes fixed on the brown smudge of smoke haze hanging over the city. “If it’s not any of those things, it’s the uniforms. You see the uniforms, the structure, the rules and regulations and protocols. Cops have their own language. Codes. Signs. They all look the same. Act the same. You thought you were going to turn up at the station on day one and fit right in, and the lonely loser you’d grown so accustomed to being for your whole damn life would be no more. You’d be a cow, identical to ten thousand other cows, rolling right off the truck and into the bosom of the herd. Your particular brand of weird instantly camouflaged.”
“You should be a psychologist,” Lamb said.
“It’s the same reason people join gangs.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So am I right? Is that the reason?”
She gave her best nonchalant shrug, but right on cue, the process began. Lamb felt the pain in her nose first. Then her eyes ached and her throat grew tight. She swiped angrily at her face.
“Oh, Jesus, Lamb.”
She heard him laughing, didn’t dare look. “I’m not crying.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Why is it so terrible for me to want that?” She swallowed a sob, felt it burn right down her throat like acid. She focused on the anger, the disappointment, the horizon of cars before her wavering and trembling through the tears. She swiped them away again. “I want to fit in. Doesn’t everybody?”
“No.”
“And I want to solve crimes. I want to use my brain.” She tapped her temple hard. “I want to commit myself to something big and important. Yes, I want to make this city better and its people happier, and all those good, wholesome, justice-y sorts of things—”
“‘Justice-y sorts of things’?” Charlie bent double and hugged himself with laughter.
“—but I also want a partner.” Lamb glared over at him. “I want to go to work in cohesion with someone. We—you know—we could look out for each other. Bounce ideas off each other. Cover each other’s asses. Policing is a dangerous profession, and when you work in danger, you’ve got to really care for each other.”
“This is so cute.” Charlie sighed, his hilarity finally receding. “Oh. Oh, this is so cute, I could just die.”
“You have barbecues at one another’s houses,” Lamb went on, more to herself than to him now, changing lanes. “The whole team. Everybody bitches about the boss. You have nicknames.”
“Look, I’m sorry to break your heart, Lamb, because you genuinely do seem like a very sweet person, but…” Charlie’s words trailed away. He gingerly fingered the stitches in his scalp and looked befuddled.
“What?”
“Your name is Lamb,” he said finally, shrugging. “You’re going to get Chop.”
“Chop?”
“Yeah. Lamb Chop.”
“Well, that’s boring.” Lamb felt her shoulders sag.
“It is.”
“I mean, why not Shanks? Why not Stew? Why not Souvlaki?”
“You want me to call you Souvlaki?”
“No, but—”
“That really rolls off the tongue. Hey, Souvlaki, pass me that Taser, will ya?”
“I don’t know why I’m still talking to you at all at this point.” Lamb sighed.
“The nickname thing, it’s not beautiful and clever and romantic the way it is on TV.” Charlie pointed to an off-ramp, and Lamb took it. “You’ll get the shortest, simplest, most logical nickname available. It’ll either be your real name cut in half, like Hoss for Hoskins, or some basic, meaningless association, like Lamb Chop for Lamb.”
She wrung the steering wheel and felt dejected.
“If you’re a Kruger, you’ll get Freddy,” Charlie went on. “Cash, you’ll get Johnny. Oh, wait. I forgot. You’re too young to know who either of those people are.”
“I know who Freddy Kruger is, asshole.”
“For a good nickname, you’ve got to do something really spectacular.” Charlie was leaning forward in his seat now, searching for their destination ahead on Lankershim Boulevard. “And somebody with a quick sense of humor has to be right there on the scene. And when I say ‘spectacular,’ I mean it. I knew an undercover once who was in a crack house full of gangsters when he got outed, and they all turned on him at once. Fought his way out using nothing but a broken umbrella. Guy’s name was Peter McGenry. Guess what everybody calls him now?”
“What?”
“Peter McGenry.”
Lamb turned into a driveway straddled by a huge royal-blue sign. Sharp gold letters glimmered as she followed traffic cones to the boom gates. UNIVERSAL STUDIOS.
“What are we doing here?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. As Lamb crept forward behind two other cars making their way through the checkpoint into the lot, she hung her elbow on the window and looked up at a huge billboard affixed to the front of a towering office building. A slender, white-blond woman was leaning on the railing of what looked like a yacht, her hair wind-whipped away from her razor-edge jawline. She was glowering at the camera, her dark brows low and her upper lip almost imperceptibly tightened in a sexy scowl. Lamb couldn’t tell what the billboard was for. It seemed to be just a picture of the actress silently challenging all who dared enter the lot.
“Urgh.” Lamb shook her head.
Charlie leaned over. “What?”
“Viola Babineaux. Look at her neck. It’s like her mother was a swan or something.”
Charlie smirked. He gave his name at the entry booth, and their car was shown through onto the studio grounds.
* * *
Charlie gave Lamb directions through the lot toward studio 33. She was driving painfully slowly, her head on a swivel, watching movie-crew people walking equipment on dollies past the huge studio roller doors, execs doing breathlessly fast walk-and-talks with their underlings in the sunshine. She stopped the car altogether to watch a pair of men in cowboy costumes guiding a horse past a coffee truck surrounded by a crowd of people. Charlie had to urge her on.
The directions ended at a row of eight single-wide trailers parked diagonally in the middle of an aisle of warehouses. People were buzzing around the trailers importantly. A queue of actors in black leather attire waited outside one that was obviously a makeup trailer for touch-ups to grievous face and neck wounds. A pair of young women were beating anxiously on the door of the nearest trailer, tasked, he guessed, with rousing some precious star who was too drunk to function before midday. Lamb parked the car fifty yards from the trailers, and they got out.
The rookie asked him again what they were doing here, who they had come to meet, but Charlie didn’t answer her. He liked secrets, surprises, comedic irony. It had made him a good undercover, his ability to tuck away interesting pieces of information for later use, or to restrain his emotional reaction and let matters unfold without intervention. A limousine pulled up behind their Kia, and Lamb scooted too close to his side. Her arm was unconsciously touching his.
And then Viola Babineaux was there. In real life.
The actress burst out of the limo like an angry horse kicking open its stall, almost clotheslining her assistant, who had jogged from the other side of the limo to open her door. The showstopping entrance, the huge sunglasses, the scowl—it was all classic Viola. Charlie felt some comfort that Viola’s behavior hadn’t changed in the five years since he had seen her in person, yet that comfort butted against the unsettling realization that she looked younger than she had on that occasion.
He was so caught up in her arrival that Charlie almost forgot to watch Lamb’s reaction. When he saw it, his face spread into a grin so wide he felt the stitches in his scalp pull. All the blood in her body rushed up and flooded her face dark and purple, and then it rushed away again, leaving her sickly pale. She grew bug-eyed, the tendons in her neck taut as she took in the billboard beauty magically sprung to life.
“Viola.” Charlie smiled. He put his arms out to hug his sister, but Viola ignored the gesture and came to a stop out of his reach, snapping into a hostile pose that was too striking to be accidental—hip slipped, leg out, arms folded.
“Well, look at you.” She flipped her sunglasses up onto her head in a whip-fast move she obviously did hundreds of times a day. “You look like something a dog coughed up. I hope they paid you good to do this to yourself.”
“It’s nice to see you, too,” Charlie said.
“You—” Lamb’s eyes were flicking between Charlie and Viola. She was trying to speak, but her throat seemed to be jammed with something she was struggling to decide whether to hack up or swallow. “You—”
“This is my sister, Viola.”
“No, that’s—” Lamb’s voice was low and hoarse suddenly. “That’s Viola Babineaux.”
“Check her Wikipedia page,” Charlie said. “She was born Viola Beatrice Hoskins. She switched to Babineaux because she thought it sounded fancy. And, no, our mother wasn’t a swan. She was a dental hygienist from Santa Barbara.”
Viola was examining Lamb now with that scalpel-sharp gaze. “Who is this little person? She’s adorable.”
“It’s a long story,” Charlie said. “Viola, I’d like to get into how glamorous you look and how I’ve missed you and how even my covert duties with one of the nation’s deadliest criminal organizations hasn’t prevented me from watching your career over the past five years with a mixture of intrigue and awe—”
“Oh, please.” Viola rolled her eyes.
“But I really need my stuff. I’ve got a case, and it’s time-critical.”
“He’s only nice to me in front of other people,” Viola told Lamb, who jolted when Viola spoke directly to her as though her words were charged with electricity. “Really, he’s an asshole to me and always has been.”
“Oh.” Lamb nodded eagerly. “Okay. Okay.”
“I hear nothing from him or about him for five years,” Viola told Lamb. “Five years. All the cops will tell me is that he’s busy. And then he pops back up with a bunch of texts giving me instructions about what to do for him. No ‘Hello.’ No ‘How are you?’”
“I’m saying hello now,” Charlie noted. “And I knew how you were. All I had to do was walk past a newspaper stand to know how you were. You go get coffee and it makes six papers and fourteen websites.”
“I had to hear what happened with the boat from one of my lawyers, who has a brother who’s a cop,” Viola said.
“So what are you complaining about, exactly?” Charlie asked.
“See?” Viola shook her head at Lamb. “Asshole.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be recuperating?” Viola squinted at Charlie. “I thought this whole undercover thing was done now.”
“It is.”
“So what’s the case?”
“Another long story,” Charlie said. “My stuff, Viola.”
“Christ! Keep your pants on.” Viola stormed off, beckoning for them over her shoulder. Viola’s assistant stayed behind with the limo while they walked the length of the row of trailers, drawing the gaze of every person in direct line of sight. As they emerged at the end of the row, Charlie discovered that, hidden by the length of the single-wides, his trailer had been tucked into the ninth parking space. The battered camper with its peeling pale blue strip running down the length was still covered in desert dust and cobwebs. The faded ladybug-patterned curtains still hid its precious contents. When he had last drawn them over its grimy windows, he had still been pretending to be an outlaw biker.
“Et voilà!” Viola flipped her sunglasses back down and gestured to the trailer with a wide sweep of her arm like she was revealing a game show prize. “Monsieur, your hunk of crap awaits. Took my guys six hours with a map, aerial photographs, a drone, and a goddamn psychic to find this thing in the middle of the desert, but it’s here now and you owe me big-time.”
“You’re the best.” Charlie nodded. “So when can we get it out of here?”
“Oh, no, it’s staying right where it is,” Viola said. “Security knows the situation. Or some of it anyway.”
“No, this won’t work.”
“Yes, it will.”
“No, it won’t.” Charlie stepped closer to his sister, saw himself reflected in the sunglasses, a bulbous caricature. “What happened to you putting it on your property in the Hills?”
“Well, Charlie, what happened is that I ignored that suggestion because it was completely insane. Do you have any idea who owns the land on either side of me?” Viola said. “That’s Brad’s place on the left and Britney’s on the right. Scorsese has a bungalow just down the street on the same side. Even if I had someone cover this piece of garbage on wheels in camouflage paint and palm fronds, it would still stick out like a dog’s balls up there. Here on the lot, you’ll blend in with the extras and the equipment techs and the food people, and all the other freaks and weirdos and clingers who hang around movie lots.”
