Money Shot

29.

I didn’t have time to feel angry or betrayed because I was too busy feeling like I was living my last ten seconds on this earth. I grabbed my duffel off the carpet and bolted into the bathroom. The Mickey Mouse lock on the bathroom door was a joke, but it might buy me an extra ten seconds, which at that point felt like doubling my lifespan. Standing in that shitty little bathroom, I was determined not to die there. I looked up at the tiny window and thought of Lia. I wondered if I would have the balls to throw myself in front of a bus if it came down to that.

Whoever had been banging on the door was in now, and had started on the bathroom door. I had no idea if they were cops or crooks and didn’t care to find out which. The bathroom window didn’t want to open more than a few inches, so I yanked down the shower curtain and wrapped it around my fist. It took more than one punch but eventually the thick, grimy glass gave way. I tossed the duffel ahead of me, hoping with irrational desperation that my blue coffee cup wouldn’t break. I didn’t even feel the jagged glass clawing at me as I squeezed through the window frame.

I had completely forgotten that I fell asleep in the spike-heeled boots until I hit the concrete. One slender, six-hundred-dollar heel snapped off and I felt my ankle twist, sending a jolt of pain up my leg. I looked both ways down the trash-strewn alley. I knew I couldn’t run on a broken heel, so before I could give it too much thought, I opened a big rusty dumpster, tossed my duffel in and dove in after it, pulling the lid down tight.

Visceral memories of my trash bag dress sank nails into my stomach as I pulled rancid, leaking garbage bags over myself, tucking my head down and silently praying for the first time since the first grade.

I heard men’s voices and running footsteps on the concrete. Then nothing.

My ankle throbbed. My head hurt. The smell was unbearable even with my t-shirt pulled up over my nose. As the adrenaline slowly ebbed away, I struggled to wrap my brain around what Malloy had done.

I had told myself again and again not to trust him, not to be a dependent little damsel in distress, but it had been way too easy to let him drive. Now that he had fucked off and left me, I felt this invisible wound that drained my resolve and replaced it with dull, hopeless anger. On the surface, my feminine ego was bruised, knowing that my bedroom blackbelt hadn’t been enough to make him stay. But underneath was so much more. I’d thought he was my friend. I’d thought that meant something. I should have known better.

I waited in the dumpster way longer than I really had to, just to be sure, and even then I could feel myself cringing as I eased the lid open, ready for a bullet.

There was no one in the alley. At least that’s what I thought at first. When I set my uneven boots on the ground, I noticed that a shape I had initially mistaken for a pile of trash was really a man. When I saw a glint of silver hair beneath the dirty crimson, I felt my stomach twist. I knew it was Malloy.

I wanted to go the other way and never look back, but I had to be sure. I limped over to where he lay, face down in an oily puddle. I was grateful for his position because there was a small neat hole in the back of his head. I’m no ballistics expert, but even I know that the little hole is where the bullet went in. There would be a much bigger, much uglier hole on the other side, where the bullet came out. The other side would be his face. I didn’t need to see that.

A few feet away from him was the open briefcase. The towels and toiletries that I had used to fill it up while Malloy was getting cigarettes were scattered down the alley as if the briefcase had been opened, thrown down and kicked over to the wall. I didn’t know why I had put the money in my duffel bag the night before. Maybe I’d had some sense of what might happen. I wondered if Malloy had decided to skate with the money after I refused to blow town with him, or if he had been planning on taking the money from day one and only asked me to come with him because he got soft after he got a taste of me. I wondered if he’d seen the towels before he died.

I wanted to feel sad, to mourn for this man who had rescued me and fucked me and betrayed me, but all I felt was a giddy, weightless sense of purpose. I felt streamlined, stripped down to fighting weight. I had absolutely nothing left. Nothing standing between me and Alan Ridgeway.

I retrieved Malloy’s keys from his pocket and crept around to the front of the Palmview, trying to grow eyes in the back of my head. No cops. No crooks. Nobody except a single scraggly tweaker pacing barefoot back and forth along the second floor breezeway, whispering intently to herself. I eased myself into Malloy’s car and locked the doors. The interior of his car still smelled like him and that hurt in a numb, abstract kind of way. I had to adjust the seat way forward to reach the pedals.

Pulling out of the parking lot, I had no idea where I was going. No solid plan, no clever scheme, nothing. I just drove.

I got on the 101 and drove west. Maybe Malloy had been right after all. Maybe the best thing to do really would be to get the hell out of Dodge. Keep on driving until I hit San Francisco and then get on a plane to anywhere. Leave all this madness behind.

But I couldn’t have done it then any more than I could have done it the night before. I had to get Ridgeway or die trying. That’s when I remembered Jesse’s cell phone.

I pulled off the freeway and into the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger. It only took a second of scrolling through the stored numbers to find one for Uncle Alan.

I spent the next hour opening and closing the little phone. I felt ashamed by how badly I wanted Malloy to be there, to light up a cigarette and squint and then let me know what we ought to do.

In the end, I went ahead speed-dialed the number.

“Christopher,” Ridgeway said as soon as he picked up. “Where the hell are you? I’ve just about had it with this blasé incompetence of yours. I ask you to take care of a single 115-pound bimbo and you can’t even do that right. I think we need to have a serious talk about your position in this organization.”

My heart was beating wildly in my chest. I could barely catch my breath to speak.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Jesse can’t come to the phone right now. Would you like to leave a message?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I could hear him smoking.

“Angel?” Ridgeway asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“How nice to hear from you,” he replied. “Where is that useless nephew of mine, anyway?”

“Never mind that,” I told him. “What you want to ask is where’s your money.”

“All right,” he said. “Where’s my money.”

“I have it right here,” I said. “If I give it back, then this business with you and me is done, right?”

“Now you’re finally being sensible,” he said. “All I ever wanted was what was rightfully mine.”

“Meet me in the lot behind 2372 Saco Street. You know the place, don’t you? It’s where your useless nephew didn’t kill me.”

“Right,” he said. “I know it.”

“Meet me there at midnight tonight,” I said. “Come alone.”

I ended the call and turned the phone off.

I sat there, gripping the wheel for what felt like forever. My whole body was shaking, my stomach roiling. Midnight? Why the fuck did I say midnight? That was sixteen hours away. I couldn’t imagine what the hell I was going to do with myself for sixteen hours.

The hours passed. I drove around. Bought food and didn’t eat it. Bought shoes and tossed the broken-heeled boots. Stared at the bland, familiar Valley mini-mall landscape. It wasn’t too late to blow town, but I didn’t. I waited until midnight.

My plan, such as it was, was a simple one. I was going to plug Ridgeway as soon as I saw him. I didn’t care if he had snipers secretly covering him. Let them shoot me after I shot him. At least the son of a bitch would beat me to hell.

Just before I got on the freeway to head downtown, I opened up the duffel bag on the seat beside me. My blue cup was broken into three pieces. The little robot was broken too, its smiling head and one arm detached from the dented body. My own little stack of cash was gone, probably still sitting on the nightstand at the Palmview where I’d left it. All I had left now was the Lakers t-shirt I didn’t want to wear because it reminded me of Lia, the gun I used to kill Jesse, and Ridgeway’s money. In a way that seemed weirdly fitting. I threw out the broken things in a 7-Eleven trashcan, traded my current garbage-stained t-shirt for the Lakers shirt and stuck the gun into the waistband of my jeans.

I got to the abandoned warehouse an hour and fifteen minutes early. There was no one there. I parked Malloy’s car over near the mercado and then cautiously walked back to the meeting place. The money was way heavier than you’d think just money would be, but the walk was still much easier than the last time I’d traveled this route.

There was still nobody in sight. The run-down industrial neighborhood was just as deserted now as it had been on the day Jesse shot me, but I still felt like I had a neon sign over my head that read I HAVE A BAG FULL OF HUNDRED DOLLAR BILLS!!!

I made it to the lot without incident. No one else was there. So I waited. In a way, the waiting seemed almost worse than getting shot. All the second-guessing, the doubts, all the bullshit running through my head. But I wanted so badly to be that badass avenging angel, so there I was. Waiting.

In the end, it wasn’t Ridgeway who showed up. It was the weasel. Lia’s boyfriend. Vukasin.

“What the fuck?” I said to him as he rounded the corner into the lot. I pulled out the gun and drew a bead on the center of his chest. “I told your boss to come alone.”

“Hello, Angel,” he said, smiling. He was wearing an expensive, new leather trench coat over yet another awful shirt. “Nice haircut.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “You get your boss on the phone and you tell him the deal is off without him.”

“I would,” Vukasin said, talking a smiling step closer to me. “But you see, I forgot to charge my cell phone. How stupid of me.”

“Stay the fuck away from me,” I warned.

“You really will shoot me now, won’t you?” he said, cocking his head and stepping back. “Our little girl is all grown up, eh?”

I caught a quick flicker in his gaze as it darted to my left and then back to my face. Alarms went off all through my body and I spun to the left just in time to meet something hard and heavy slamming into my temple. The smug and mocking thought that chased me down into blackness was... some avenging angel.