Money Shot

18.

What can I say about the Sherman Oaks Fashion Square mall? You’ve been to any mall in America, you don’t need me to describe the place. Stores. Shoppers. The American consumer dream all spread out and waiting, available for a price. Everything your sheep-like heart has been trained to desire. I hate malls. They’re like strip clubs for women. All tease and sparkle and the empty promise that if you just drop enough cash, somehow you’ll be fulfilled. The slick, shameless, never-ending hustle of a shopping mall makes places like Eye Candy look downright charitable by comparison. When I need to buy stuff, I’d much rather shop online. That way I don’t have to battle my way through all those lonely, desperate, retail-therapy junkies. Nothing more depressing than watching these skinny, manic women digging their own graves with a credit card while their bored husbands furtively eye my assets, trying to figure out if I really am Angel Dare or just look like her. The only kind of store I really love to browse in is a hardware store. I’m a compulsive fixer-upper, always on the lookout for new things for my house. At least I used to be. I have no idea what I am now.

Our destination was the food court and at that weekday lunch hour it was packed with cubicle drones wearing sensible shoes and laminated IDs around their necks. The ring of fast food options represented all the usual franchise suspects. Chinese, Italian, American, Middle Eastern. Ostensible variety that was really all the same school lunch food under different-flavored sauces.

Still, as much as I might hate malls, you had to admit Lia had made a smart choice for a meeting place. It was public, patrolled by security guards and packed with potential witnesses. I wondered how a girl who was essentially a captive sex slave from another country knew about this mall, but remembering her note claiming to have gotten one guy to “like her like a girlfriend” made me remember her expensive hair and nails. Her fancy heels. I pictured her working on her erstwhile beau to take her shopping. Batting her eyelashes and talking of lingerie and sexy shoes and all the while taking mental notes, memorizing everything. That girls had brains, I’d give her that. Brains and balls.

Malloy wanted us to move through the mall separately. Close but not obviously together.

“That way,” Malloy told me as he had parked the car up on a high, nearly deserted level of the parking structure, “if I get recognized, you won’t. We don’t know if your pal from Vegas got the note or information about its contents out of Zandora before we showed up or not. No point taking unnecessary chances.”

I opened the make-up mirror inside the visor on the passenger side and snuck a quick glance at the reflected image of that blond guy, Daniel. Imagining I was someone else made mirrors less of an ordeal.

The fading bruises around my eyes made the new blue contacts look lurid and too bright. The white tape had peeled off my nose in the shower that morning but some black sticky adhesive gunk was left behind and I couldn’t get it off because it hurt to scrub too hard. I ran a hand over the bleachy yellow buzz cut. I wouldn’t recognize me.

We left the car and headed down into the mall. I tailed Malloy past the Gap, past the Body Shop, threading through the lunchtime crowd in his wake until we reached the abovementioned food court.

I stationed myself by a smoothie stand where I had a decent view of the whole court and several exits. Every skinny blonde that passed made my heart twist under my ribs but none of them were Lia. Noon came and went without incident.

I watched Malloy lingering by the Sbarro and then without meeting my eyes he made a tight little gesture with his chin toward the stairs that led up to a second-level seating area. Unsure if he meant for me to follow him or not, I watched him head up, out of sight. Then, less than ten seconds later, he was heading back down. I could read the tension under his casual stroll and I wasn’t all that surprised when I spotted the weasel, my pal from Vegas, coming down the steps behind him.

I turned away, pretending to study the smoothie menu while watching Malloy out of the corner of my eye. He walked right past me and went into the bookstore on my left. I had no idea what he was doing. Apparently, neither did the weasel, but he followed Malloy into the store anyway.

I knew nothing could happen here in the mall, in full view of the security guards and all these civilians, but I also figured the weasel would follow us up through the parking structure and in that big hollow empty space it would be a whole different story.

Malloy and I had agreed that if anything went wrong in the mall, I was supposed to get the hell out and catch a bus back to his place. He had given me a spare key and when he’d slipped it into my hip pocket, I’d felt almost like we were dating or something. I had spent more solid back-to-back time with Malloy than with anyone else since I’d moved out of my parents’ house back in Chicago, yet we were not sleeping together. It felt so strange, unnatural somehow.

Watching Malloy browsing through the bookstore like there wasn’t a homicidal scumbag following him around, I wondered if now wasn’t a good time to bug out. Before I could decide one way or the other, I saw Malloy stumble and bump into the weasel, slapping his shoulder and smiling in that same dumb, friendly manner he had when he went into Eye Candy. I watched with baffled amazement, squinting and trying to figure out what the hell he was doing.

After his collision with the weasel, Malloy made his roundabout way out of the store. When the weasel followed, the shoplifting alarm went off.

Security guards immediately confronted the weasel and, after much protest from him, one of the guards pulled a small gilt-edged gift book from his jacket pocket. Some cheesy little thing full of uplifting quotes and photos of kittens, the kind of thing that you get as a gift from your grandmother and never read. Chicken Soup for the Homicidal Scumbag’s Soul.

Malloy passed by me and whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

“Car,” he said.

Then he was gone.

The weasel was being escorted out of the mall while shouting angrily into his cell phone. I looked back up at the smoothie menu as if deciding between the Berry-licious VitaWhip or the Banana Mango Fandango. The busty, cow-eyed brunette behind the counter suddenly turned to me with an expression of startled panic, as if she’d only just noticed me even though I’d been standing there for several minutes. Her hair was chopped into one of those weird new mullety, cowlicky bowl-cuts and she had a ring through her lower lip that looked painfully infected. She grimaced and recited her upbeat franchise-robot script with a clenched and desperate tone.

“Good afternoon, sir, and welcome to Nutra-Freeze Healthy Smoothie Paradise. Can I take your order?”

Sir. God that was weird. I waited until the weasel made like Elvis and left the building, then I shook my head at the smoothie girl.

“I... uh... changed my mind,” I told her.

She looked painfully relived. I thought, not unkindly, that with an impressive natural rack like hers, she’d do better to ditch the ugly orange Nutra-Freeze tunic and get into porn. That thought made me think of Sam. Thinking of Sam hurt and so I forced myself to think of getting the hell out of there.

I hustled back the way I came and headed for the parking structure. As I went, every single person I passed seemed leering and sinister. Teenage boys. Moms with strollers. Mall-walking grannies. They all looked like axe murderers to me. Paranoia notwithstanding, I somehow found my way back to the level where Malloy had parked the car.

I could hear a terse, stifled rhythm of punches and grunts coming from the opposite side of Malloy’s SUV and my blood went cold. I stood there for a heartbeat or two, dumb and frozen like a rabbit in the headlights. Then, on a split-second impulse, I headed diagonally away from Malloy’s car and over toward the only other vehicle parked on that level, a green minivan.

Standing by the minivan, fumbling through my pockets in a lame-ass pantomime of looking for keys I didn’t have, I risked a peek back toward Malloy’s car. I saw Malloy in a fierce, sloppy scuffle with a guy who was a little shorter than him but much thicker. The shorter guy looked like he was getting the upper hand over Malloy. There was blood on Malloy’s flushed face and on the oily concrete at their feet. That’s when I simultaneously realized two things. First, that the guy fighting with Malloy was the rhino—the guy who’d shot Sam in the knee. Second, that I had a loaded gun in my duffel bag.