Money Shot

28.

I buried Jesse. The soft plink of tiny rocks and sand hitting the metal chair seemed way too loud in the big desert night. I could have used some help, but I was glad Malloy hung back and left me to handle it alone. I needed the time to get my shit together.

It’s not that I was freaked out or disturbed by what I had done. I don’t exactly know how to describe what I was feeling as I buried the man who had raped me. Killing the rhino had been different. Impulsive. What I had done to Jesse, well, that was something else. In a way, it’s like I was burying my old self in that pit. The person that I’d been before I’d looked into a man’s eyes and shot him dead. The person that I was now, the delicate newborn killer that Jesse made me, needed the slow thoughtless shoveling like an insect still wet from metamorphosis needs time to dry its wings and figure out how to work its brand new form.

Because the killing wasn’t over yet.

“Done?” Malloy asked when I finally came back to the car. He squinted at me, spit on his fingers and extinguished his cigarette. He put the butt into a small plastic bag filled with several others.

I nodded. It was chilly now that the physical labor was done but I barely felt it. As we quickly loaded the remaining equipment into the trunk, I saw a small, expensive cell phone and a scatter of change on the carpet inside the trunk. Probably fell out of Jesse’s pocket while he was flailing around in there. I took the phone and put it into my duffel bag, figuring it might have some useful numbers. Malloy got into the car and motioned for me to get in, too.

“You got a little...” Malloy pointed to his chin and handed me a napkin from a Mexican restaurant.

I flipped down the visor and looked into the mirror. There were four perfectly round drops of blood like a small constellation on my face. One on my chin, one at the corner of my mouth, one just under my eye and one on my temple. As I wiped them away, I noticed that my bruises were almost completely healed. I still didn’t look anything like I’d used to.

The radio had been on when Malloy killed the ignition and came back on too loudly when he started the car up again. The song was some sappy power ballad that had been popular when I first got into the business. I couldn’t remember the name of the band and couldn’t make myself care. Malloy reached to turn it off.

“Leave it,” I said. I wanted to hear something that didn’t matter.

Malloy nodded and put his hand back on the wheel. We didn’t speak. Malloy drove back to the Palmview.

The sun was coming up as we pulled into the mostly empty lot of the Palmview. We both knew there wasn’t any hope for sleep. I felt cold even though Malloy had given me his jacket again.

“You want coffee?” Malloy asked.

“Sure,” I replied.

We went to a Starbucks down the block. I couldn’t tolerate the clever, market-researched design of the place, so we took our expensive coffee back to the rental car and sat in the parking lot. Neither of us actually said Now what, but that’s what we both were thinking.

“Roxette,” I finally said. “I guess we need to figure out where the hell she went.”

Malloy shrugged and sipped his coffee while I called her various numbers again. Again, no answer.

We wasted a couple of hours hitting all the places where Roxette could have been. Nothing. No one had seen or heard from her since last Friday before the meeting with Celestine.

“She could have taken the money and fucked off to South America by now,” Malloy said.

I shook my head.

“She has money,” I said. “Her folks are loaded and she’s still pulling a huge day rate. She took the briefcase because she was curious, because she takes things. Not because she needed the money. Anyway it’s locked with a combination. She probably hasn’t even tried to open it.”

“Ok, then where the hell is she?” Malloy asked. “Do you think she might have fallen off the wagon?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Meth was her drug of choice, right?” Malloy asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“So if she wanted to get back into it, who would she call? Who would hook her up?”

I knew exactly who would hook her up, but just thinking his name made me queasy.

If you spend any amount of time working in the porn industry, you quickly get numb to drug casualties, just like you get numb to prolapsed rectums on set and guys sticking needles in their johnsons and all the other workaday atrocities of the modern smut racket. But I have to admit the sordid downward spiral of Thick Vic Ventura got under my skin. Not just because we had been lovers off camera, but because he had been so smart and funny. So real. So much like me.

Vic was from the South Side of Chicago, like me. Italian like me. His real name was Joey Pagliuca. He’d gone to high school with my brothers at St. Laurence and dated a girl two grades ahead of me at Queen of Peace. He’d left for Hollywood when I was just a freshman. He’d looked like a rock star, with his tattoos and long black hair—not exactly handsome, but charismatic. He had come to L.A. with ambitions to be a stand-up comedian. He was irreverent, sharp and wickedly sarcastic, but his comedy act had never caught on. In the end, it wasn’t his dirty jokes but his astounding endowment that made him famous and gave him the nickname Thick Vic.

Like a lot of guys blessed (or cursed) with freakishly enormous dicks, he sometimes had trouble getting it up. It never really got all the way hard and he always joked that if it ever did, he would pass out from lack of blood to his brain. Still, with a good tight grip on the base, he was able to squeeze enough blood into the top nine inches to get the job done.

That was on camera. Off camera it didn’t much matter to me. So many guys think they won’t be able to cut the mustard with me because they aren’t packing thirteen concrete inches. The truth is, the biggest, hardest dick in the world is useless if you don’t know how to eat pussy; and Vic not only knew how to eat pussy but genuinely enjoyed it. He was one of the best lovers I’ve ever had.

But unsurprisingly, after a few years in the industry, the rock star lifestyle and hard partying took its toll on him. It got tougher and tougher for him to perform and he started getting a reputation for unreliable wood. A reputation like that is a death sentence for male talent.

Anything approaching real “dating” in the porn industry is challenging at best. When one partner is on the way up and the other on the way down, emotional disaster is pretty much a forgone conclusion. A Porn Star Is Born. When Vic stopped getting calls, he started getting clingy and jealous. He threw macho Italian temper tantrums in public places and we started having more screaming fights than screaming orgasms. His drinking and drug use got more and more out of control. It would have only been a matter of time before he pulled a Cal Jammer and blew his brains out in my driveway, so I put the relationship out of its misery. I don’t think I personally sent him over the edge, since he was already well on his way before I kicked him to the curb, but I’m sure he’d tell you different. The last I heard of Thick Vic, he had failed his third attempt at rehab and was making ends meet by dealing methamphetamines to girls in the business.

When I’d first met Roxette, she had laughingly admitted that she used to party with Thick Vic before her drug-induced heart attack. She told me that he was still hung up on me after all these years and when the meth psychosis got really bad, he often thought she was Angel Dare.

I didn’t tell any of this to Malloy. I just told him I thought I knew a guy who might know where Roxette had gone to ground.

Finding Thick Vic wasn’t hard. A couple three phone calls and we discovered he was currently mooching off has-been plastic surgery casualty Taylor Simone.

Taylor was big around the same time that I was. Pretty in that standard blonde California way that everybody was back then. We did a few scenes together but all I remember about her was the fact that she ate pussy like a dog playing tug-of-war and left me raw for days. She lived out in Valley Village, near the freeway. Her sad little house was a disaster of strewn lingerie and chihuahuas and vodka bottles. She came to the door dressed only in little kid’s Batman boxer shorts and a tan. She looked worse than I could have imagined.

I was amazed that someone so thin was able to stand up without assistance, let alone counterbalance the fifty pound pair of silicone beach balls shrink-wrapped to the front of her box-kite ribcage. Under her frazzled blonde weave, her face was a cheap doll’s face, flash frozen and nerve-dead from too much surgery. Her nails were crooked pink sloth-hooks and her bony, nervous hands made clutching, Nosferatu shadows across her concave belly. She had drenched herself in cloying, sugary perfume that smelled like the kind of cheap vanilla frosting that comes in a can.

I have never understood this new trend where girls who don’t eat anything but lettuce and ice cubes want to smell like cupcakes. On Taylor, the childish scent was made far worse by its inability to mask the toxic booze-breath and the underlying corruption of her slowly dying flesh. She made no attempt to cover her freakshow tits as she stood in the doorway glaring at us.

“Are you here to get that girl?” she asked.

Malloy and I exchanged puzzled looks.

“We’re looking for Vic,” Malloy said.

“He went to find someone to help get that fucking psycho bitch out of my bathroom,” Taylor said. She gestured down a dim, cluttered hallway to her right. “If he doesn’t get back soon, I’m gonna call the cops and let them know they can take him too for all I care. You see if I don’t.”

“Do you have any idea who you’re fucking with?” a hoarse voice shouted. “Do you? You don’t know who I am!”

It was Roxette.

Suddenly, Taylor was crying. Her frozen face struggled to crumple into something like a human expression but all she could really do was open and close her bloated lips, like a dying fish.

“I told him not to bring girls here anymore,” Taylor said, leaning heavily into the doorframe. “What he does on his own time is his business, but this is my house. It’s my house.”

“That’s terrible,” Malloy said, taking her by the shoulder and gently moving her out of the doorway so we could enter. “You let him live under your roof, the least he could do is treat you with some respect.”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Taylor said, looking up at Malloy. “I’m not the jealous type. I don’t want to run his life, I just want respect in my own house. Is that so much to ask?”

“Of course not,” Malloy said, motioning for me to shut the door. When it was closed, he caught my eye over the top of her head, gestured toward the bathroom door with his chin.

I left Malloy with Taylor and headed down the hallway toward the bathroom where I had heard Roxette’s voice.

“Roxette,” I said, knocking tentatively on the door.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Roxette replied. “I’m not stupid.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid, Roxette,” I said. “Why don’t you open the door and we can talk about it?”

“You think I don’t know about the transmitter?” she whispered. “I know all about the transmitter.”

I shook my head. This was going to be really bad. I took a deep breath and took a gamble.

“Roxette,” I said again. “Roxette, it’s Angel.”

“Angel?” Roxette’s voice sounded suddenly anxious and childlike.

“Can I come in?” I asked.

“How do I know it’s really you?” Roxette asked, voice suddenly closer as if she had just pressed up against the other side of the door. “What shoes was I wearing on the day we met?”

I rolled my eyes. That was nearly a year ago. I couldn’t even remember what shoes I had been wearing that day. I tried to focus on recalling Roxette’s feet. It had been the middle of a hot San Fernando summer and I seemed to remember her painted toenails so the shoes must have been open toed. Sandals of some kind, but that was the best I could do. I was drawing a blank.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t remember.”

A jagged sob sounded behind the door.

“I can’t remember either,” Roxette said, bawling like her heart had just been broken. I heard a rhythmic thumping and was pretty sure she was hitting her head against the door.

“Please, Roxette,” I said. “Just open the door a little ways. I won’t try to come in if you don’t want me to, okay?”

The thumping stopped.

“Okay,” she said suddenly, like it had never been any big deal.

I heard the lock disengage and then a sweaty slice of Roxette’s face appeared in a narrow crack, a single pinhole-pupiled eye staring out at me like the eye of a trapped animal.

“Oh my god,” Roxette said. “They cut your hair!”

A hot, skinny hand reached out and pulled me into the bathroom.

Taylor’s bathroom looked like it had been designed for a life-sized Barbie. Pink on pink with pink trim, pink carpet, even a pink toilet. The added splashes of irregular crimson clashed violently with the girly bubblegum color scheme.

Roxette was naked and icy pale. It was nothing most of America hadn’t seen before, but there was a new addition. She had a hole in the top of her right thigh. In her hand she clutched a pink toothbrush, its bristles clogged with blood. There were bandages all over the floor and I could see a flat, pancaked bullet in the bottom of the pink toilet. It wasn’t a stretch to figure she had dug that bullet out of her leg with the toothbrush. I was horrified when she turned away from me and went back to work on the hole with the bloody bristles.

“I’m pretty sure I got most of the transmitter out,” she told me, not looking up from her task. “But they make them so they can rebuild themselves if even one tiny piece is left so you just can’t be too careful.”

“Who did this to you?” I asked. “Who shot you, Roxette?”

“It was those guys my dad sent to spy on me,” she told me. “They have cameras in their eyes that transmit back to his office by satellite. You think that’s just in the movies, but you’re wrong. My dad owns the company that invented the technology for eye cameras. If you don’t believe me, just watch the Discovery Channel. See, as soon as my dad found out I had the briefcase, he told them to shoot me with a transmitter bullet so they could track me. They thought I didn’t know about the transmitter but ha ha because I showed them, didn’t I? I got away and showed them.”

“You sure did,” I said, trying not to look at what she was doing to her leg. “What happened to the briefcase, Roxette?”

She gestured at a sopping pile of towels in the bathtub. “I covered it with wet towels to block the signal. Now I need to get to Vancouver before 3AM tonight or else.”

She looked up, suddenly confused.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“It’s me, Angel,” I said.

“How do I know it’s really you?” she asked.

I was losing ground.

“They poisoned my cat,” she told me. “I found his head in my purse.”

She went back to her scrubbing.

I figured Vukasin must have been the one who shot her. Either him or one of Ridgeway’s other errand boys. Whoever stole the security tape from my building had probably just methodically gone down the list of every single recognizable person who had visited my office that day. Roxette is pretty recognizable. She would have been easy to find. I couldn’t imagine how she’d managed to get away from whoever shot her without losing the briefcase, but whatever had happened it had clearly sent her over the edge. Instead of going to the cops, she’d gone to Thick Vic Ventura.

I struggled to come up with some way to get her to give me the briefcase, some clever ruse that would dovetail into her ever-shifting psychosis, but I just couldn’t think of a thing. In the end, I didn’t have to. She made me take it.

“Oh my God!” she said suddenly, whirling around and gripping my arm way harder than you’d think a skinny little thing like her could. “God fucking god, I need you to do me this really huge favor.”

“Okay,” I said warily, trying to extract myself from her grip and failing.

“You need to take the transmitters to the Channel 7 news.”

“Sure,” I said, trying to keep a neutral expression as she pressed her hot face closer to mine. Her eyes were both vacant and terrifying.

“You have to swear on your own grave,” she said. “Swear or you’ll die seven times.”

“I swear on my own grave,” I said, trying not to cringe away.

“Okay,” she said, suddenly breaking away and circling in a tight zoo animal orbit. “Okay okay okay. We’ll need a towel.”

I got one of the sopping wet towels out of the bathtub while she fished the bullet out of the toilet. I held the towel out to her and she deposited the flattened bullet on the towel’s sagging center. Then she wrapped the bullet up in another towel and handed the bundle back to me.

“Take this too,” she said, scooping up the briefcase and pressing it into my arms. “And the cat head.”

She picked up a pink net bath poof and spoke gently to it before setting it carefully on top of my dripping burden.

“Hurry,” Roxette said. “You have to make the seven o’clock news on Channel 7. Remember you swore on your own grave, Charlie.”

I had no idea who Charlie was, but at that point all I cared about was getting the hell out of there.

“I swear,” I said.

She hustled me out the door and swiftly locked it behind me. As soon as I reached the end of the hallway, I ditched the wet towels, the bullet and the bath poof and set the briefcase down on the carpet. It took me a second of staring at the little brass line-up of three numbered wheels to remember the combination I had seen Lia use in my office that day. 666. The number of the beast.

Maybe Roxette’s meth-induced madness was catching or maybe it was just my own sleep-deprived state of mind, but as I popped open the latches I had a sudden irrational fear that the case would contain not money but something awful. It took everything I had to make my hands push open that case.

It was full of money, just like Ridgeway had said. There was no time to count, but it looked like a lot. Brick upon brick of banded hundreds, along with Lia’s original handwritten note. I closed the case. I’d count the money later.

When I got back into the living room, I found Malloy grimly battling to maintain his virtue and keep Taylor’s fingers out of his fly. A fat white chihuahua was furiously humping his leg.

“Come on, baby,” Taylor was saying. “Don’t be shy.”

“Christ,” Malloy said. “What took you so long?”

He extricated himself from Taylor’s boozy affections and looked down at the briefcase, eyes widening. As he pried himself loose, Taylor burst into braying sobs.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said. “Before—”

Of course, that was the moment Thick Vic picked to show back up with the cavalry that was supposed to help get Roxette out of the bathroom.

His assistants were a couple of aging bikers, a hamburger and hotdog pair with matching leather vests and matching scars. The burger was short and barrel-shaped with more white hair on his chinless face than on his large shiny head. The hotdog was tall and scrawny with his long black hair bound into two braids like that Indian who used to cry about pollution on TV. Turned out that guy wasn’t really Native American after all. I didn’t think this guy was either.

Seeing Vic again after nearly ten years probably would have been a lot tougher if the girl who used to care about him hadn’t been buried out in the desert along with Jesse Black. Standing there in Taylor Simone’s living room holding a briefcase full of stolen cash, I just sized Vic up along with his two buddies and decided they posed no threat.

Vic’s long dark hair was mostly gone and what was left had been scraped back into a frizzy little ponytail. His fragile, skeletal physique made the desk clerk at the Palmview look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and his face and arms were pocked with scars and scabs from needles and endless picking at imaginary crank bugs. If you slugged him, he would probably fall into a heap of dust on the piss-stained carpet.

“Get your shit and get the fuck out,” Taylor screeched suddenly, reaching for Malloy. “I got a new boyfriend now who respects me, you junkie piece of shit.”

“Jesus,” Malloy said, stepping back out of her desperate grasp.

“You lying fucking whore!” Vic hollered. “You told me you were still sore from that last surgery and now you’re banging some other guy behind my back?”

“Maybe if you could make that big dead thing between your legs do something other than lay there like a fucking roadkill snake,” Taylor said, staggering to her feet, “I wouldn’t have to go for other guys!”

“I got no problem getting it up for Roxette,” Vic said.

Taylor let out a shriek and launched herself at Vic. The two of them tumbled awkwardly to the floor, sending platform heels and panties flying in their wake. The two bikers looked at me and Malloy and shrugged. The hotdog lit a cigarette and the burger wandered into the kitchen. Roxette was still howling in the bathroom. Malloy got a light from the hotdog and motioned toward the door. Vic and Taylor crashed into a spindly wire CD tower that was sturdier than either of them, knocking it over and scattering disks and splintered jewel cases across the carpet. No one seemed to notice the briefcase. No one tried to stop us when we left.

Nowhere to go but back to the Palmview. Malloy left to return the rental car and get food and cigarettes. I sat numbly on the bed with the duffel bag containing my meager worldly possessions and the briefcase containing what counted out to exactly one hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

I still felt raw and strange from the bad business with Jesse and beneath that was the dull, constant ache of grief over Didi and Sam. Over my house and my business and everything that used to matter. There didn’t seem to be any kind of order or logic to this madness. Crazy, random things just kept on happening, dragging me along behind them on an unbreakable choke chain. I really wanted to be some kind of badass avenging angel, and standing over Jesse’s grave I’d almost felt like I could be, but now I felt scattered and unfocused. I couldn’t find my way back up into the driver’s seat.

This game was far from over and wouldn’t be over until Ridgeway was dead. Killing Jesse was a start, but the truth was, Jesse was just a tool. It was Ridgeway who was calling all the shots and I couldn’t let myself disintegrate before I got to him. In the meantime, I needed to do something I could be sure of. Something to take control.

So I did two things. First I took the money out of the briefcase and packed it into my duffel bag, refilling the case with hand towels and toiletries from the Hilton until the weight felt right. Then I pulled on the stiletto-heeled designer boots.

When Malloy returned, I stood by the bed, facing the door. Hip cocked, smiling. I was naked except for the boots. My lips were slick with the cheap red lipstick. Even with the short hair, I knew I looked damn good. I looked like a woman.

“Lalo,” I said. “Come here.”

Malloy cautiously set his grocery bag down on the little table, pushing the door shut behind him.

“Angela” he said, but I didn’t let him finish.

I could feel him fighting himself, trying to hold back and stay cool but I knew it couldn’t last. After all, I am a professional. I broke through his resistance as easily as he had taken down that thug in Vegas.

The raw lust that sprang free from behind that wall of stoic resistance was intoxicating. I needed it like other people need air and I filled myself up with it, gorged myself on it as he lifted me off my feet, holding me breathless against him and then tossing me down onto the rickety bed. He came down after me, heavy and eager, big hands all over me just like I wanted. But when I reached down to unzip his trousers, the wall was back as he suddenly dodged me, rolling away to one side.

“Angel,” he said again. “I...”

I tried to kiss him again, but he wouldn’t let me. His face was flushed pink, his eyes narrow.

“Look, Angel,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

I had a sudden chilly fear that he would turn out to be the kind of guy who can’t get past the porn star thing. The kind of guy who’s turned off by the sheer number of priors. But my instinct told me he wasn’t turned off in the slightest. His body was practically vibrating with leashed desire. I couldn’t imagine what was holding him back until he spoke.

“I...” he said, eyes cutting away from mine. “I’m not... built like those guys in your movies.”

It took everything I had not to burst out laughing. That’s what this was about? Macho tough guy Malloy was worried that his dick was too small to satisfy Angel Dare? I can’t tell you the number of times I’d heard those exact words or variations on that theme, but I never in a million years expected to hear it from Malloy.

I reached down and put my hand on what he had. He was no Thick Vic, but like most guys he was selling himself short.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told him.

Then I proved it.

After, we lay side by side, close but not touching. I can’t say that I felt like my old self. I didn’t think I’d ever really feel like that again, but I felt like a stronger and more focused version of whoever this new person was. Malloy got up and padded over to the table to get out another carton of cigarettes. He wasn’t some kind of Hollywood muscle boy, but he looked good naked.

“Maybe we should get the hell out of Dodge,” Malloy said, back half-turned as he tore open the carton.

“What do you mean?” I asked, leaning up on one elbow.

“I mean just say fuck it,” Malloy replied, shaking a cigarette loose from a new pack. “Go to Belize or something. I don’t know.”

“You want to run away with me, Lalo?” I asked, smiling just a little.

He shrugged and lit up the cigarette then came back over to the bed, lying back and throwing one thick arm up behind his head.

“Would that be so bad?” he asked.

Would it? He was a good lover. Earnest, quietly intense and focused on giving me pleasure. He was also apparently not into the kind of over-the-top theatrics that seem to be a given these days when everyone has gotten their idea of good sex from porn. Guys get with a porn star and they think that kind of shit is what we really want every day. Here’s a tip for you. We do the things we do in porn because they look good, not because they feel good. Anyone who’s ever done an airtight reverse cowgirl will tell you that, and I’m not just talking about the girls either. Luckily I didn’t have to explain any of this to Malloy. And more importantly, he didn’t try to snuggle. He just smoked and gave me space.

It’s not like I had anything left in L.A. either. Didi was dead. Daring Angels was dead. Angel Dare was dead, or the next best thing. Up until that minute, I hadn’t given any thought to anything but revenge. Could there really be some new kind of life for me now? Some way to start over?

Maybe, I thought, I really should quit while I was ahead. I had one hundred and eighty grand of Ridgeway’s cash as payback for what he put me through. Couldn’t I call it even and disappear? Me and Malloy. Why not?

I knew perfectly well why not. Because as long as that bastard Ridgeway was alive, I would never be at peace. I couldn’t let it go. Maybe I should have, but I couldn’t.

“No,” I said. “I can’t go anywhere until that son of a bitch gets what’s coming to him. I just can’t, Lalo.”

“Getting to Ridgeway isn’t gonna be easy,” Malloy said. “It may be impossible. It’s not unlikely that he’ll get to you first. Guys like him almost never get what’s coming to them.”

“I understand,” I said. “But I have to keep trying. It’s all I’ve got left.”

Malloy nodded, smoked and said nothing. After a minute or two passed, he spoke.

“After my wife left me and took Paloma back to Santa Fe,” he said. “I didn’t date anyone for a long time. I mean sure, I fucked around, but I never let any women get to me. I was drinking back then and didn’t give much of a damn about anything. Then I met someone. She was a pro, you know? A call girl, but she never took a dime from me. Her name was Carla. She was from El Salvador. Long legs. Beautiful. Guys would line up to be with her.”

I didn’t say anything.

“One of her customers killed her,” he said. “Strangled her.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth and touched his lips with his thumb. “We knew who did it but we couldn’t make it stick. He walked.”

I turned to look at him. He didn’t look back at me. His gaze stayed fixed on the water-stained ceiling.

“The guy was this low-rent Hollywood sleazebag,” Malloy continued. “But he was connected. He had good lawyers. Carla, she was just another dead call girl. She didn’t matter, and so the guy walked.”

He took a long drag on the cigarette.

“It took three years, but I got to the guy,” Malloy said. “I took him out to the desert and made him sorry for what he did. Then I killed him.”

Malloy’s cigarette was burned down almost to the filter. He crushed it out in the cheap glass ashtray on the built-in nightstand.

“For those three years,” he said. “I couldn’t think about anything else. Planning to kill that guy ate up every second I was awake and all my dreams too. I had nothing else. I made stupid mistakes on the job. Nearly got myself killed. All because I couldn’t think about anything but how I was going to get that guy. For Carla.” He got out another cigarette and lit up. “The drinking got out of hand. I lost my badge. I deserved it, too. I was a fuck-up and I knew it, but I just couldn’t stop. It was like being in love, you know. Only hate.”

Man, did I know. That was exactly how I had felt about Jesse. I still felt that way about Ridgeway. If you would have told me how much I had in common with someone like Malloy two weeks before, I would have laughed. Now I felt like he was the one person on earth who understood what I was going through.

“When it was over,” he continued, “when I’d watched that fucker take his last breath, I realized I didn’t feel any different. I didn’t miss her any less. I’d devoted my whole life to getting that guy and once it was done, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I thought it would be this great victory but it wasn’t.” He turned to me. “I guess I’m just trying to say that revenge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. That’s all.”

I sat up and tried to run my fingers through hair that wasn’t there anymore. I knew he was right. I wanted to run away with him and find some new kind of person to be. To start over someplace where no one had ever heard of Angel Dare. I wanted that, but I knew I wasn’t going to have it.

“I know you’re right,” I said. “I do. But I can’t walk away until this is done. Maybe after...”

I trailed off, unable to finish. I don’t think either of us really believed in after anymore.

Malloy looked away. He seemed to be wrestling with something big, trying to find words that just wouldn’t come. In the end he just said, “Okay, Angel. If that’s how you want it.”

“I’ll show you how I want it,” I said.

It was a cheap ploy, nothing but fleshy distraction from all the things I didn’t want to think about. Our hearts weren’t really in it. But we went through the motions anyway, just to have something to do. When it was done, I could feel exhaustion catching up with me. I tried to count the hours since I had last slept, but fell asleep counting.

I slept for what felt like forever and then came awake suddenly to the sound of pounding on the door. I was groggy and stupid but adrenaline quickly got my body clothed and upright. Standing, I realized two things at once. Malloy was gone. So was the briefcase.