Evan chose a midlevel motel in a less-nice part of Santa Monica several miles from the beach. With Katrin clinging to his arm in the role of browbeaten spouse, he checked in using a fake driver’s license and paid with a credit card tied to a cul-de-sac of a bank account. He booked three rooms on the ground floor with connecting doors for their extended family, due any minute now. Then he led Katrin into the middle room and waited patiently in a rickety wooden chair while she cleaned up in the bathroom. The sink water ran for a long time. When she came out, the red rims of her eyes looked pronounced against her alabaster skin.
She sat on the bed, pressed her hands between her knees. “God,” she said. She glanced over to the little desk, on which Evan had set out a stack of cash and a burner phone, and made a noise deep in her throat.
“Don’t leave this room. Order in only, have them set the food outside, slide the money under the door. Don’t use the phone unless it’s to call me. Understand?”
“This isn’t real. This can’t be real. We have to call them. We have to find out about my dad, and now they can’t call me since you took my phone and—”
“Where did Morena approach you?”
Katrin jogged her head back and forth slightly, as if to clear her thoughts. “I was playing roulette. Shitty odds, I know, but I was down to my last thousand.… It was a Hail Mary. I thought if God or karma or whatever you want to call it was on my side, I could hit ten on the wheel. And then again. And again. Until I had two-point-one million. Until I could save my dad.” She misted up and had to pause. “I didn’t know what to do. I don’t have anything. I don’t have money like that. Look, I really think we need to contact these guys—”
“How did she pick you out?”
“How do you think? I must’ve seemed like a fucking mess — because I was a fucking mess. And then this kid comes up. Looked barely old enough to be there. And she said, ‘Are you in trouble?’ Like she was searching for me.”
Morena’s aunt lived in Vegas, and she’d made it clear that she and Carmen were heading there. What better place than a casino to search out someone in desperate shape?
Katrin continued, “And you know how sometimes someone asks you the wrong question at the wrong time? I just started crying. And then we sat down, and she told me her story. And I told her mine. Well, part of it. But enough. And she gave me your number. I didn’t know what to think, whether I should trust her. I drove back to L.A., mulling it over. Then I gave in and called.”
“You told her your story? Even though you’d just met her?”
“A version of it, like I said.” Katrin’s neck firmed, and he saw a trace of steel beneath the green eyes. “Wait a minute. Is this some sort of test? After what you just saw? Like I made up almost getting shot? You seriously don’t trust me?”
“If I didn’t trust you, you wouldn’t be here.”
Her throat clicked as she swallowed.
“There’s no question they’re trying to kill you,” Evan said. “I just need to understand precisely what happened.”
She stood up, and he followed suit. “What about my dad?”
“We’ll get to that.”
“They said. They said I couldn’t tell anyone. Me calling you? That could’ve killed my father.” She twisted a hand hard in the hem of her shirt, as if working out a violent impulse. “We have to call. We have to—”
He took her arms gently and moved her back a step. “The first thing we do is nothing. If we do nothing, nothing can happen. Adrenaline is up right now, everyone will be amped, excitable, prone to making mistakes. Let them calm down. We want nerves to settle. We’ll call tomorrow, negotiate your father’s release.”
“There’s no negotiating with them. There’s no moving them.” She scanned the room, as if noticing for the first time the print bedspread, the shitty pastel art. “This was all a mistake,” she said. “I have to go. I have to get my car and … and—”
“You’re not getting your car. It’s not safe to leave. The sniper is still out there. He was working with at least one other person. There might be others.”
“The guy. The one you killed. Did you see him? One eye was still open.…” Her bloodred lips pressed together to keep from trembling. “And you think there might be others?”
“Maybe.”
“Because a sniper isn’t enough?”
“I won’t let them lay a finger on you.”
“I’m not worried about a finger.” Then she did something completely unexpected. She laughed. A real laugh, too, that beautiful mouth even wider, half hidden behind a raised hand. A few strands of jet-black hair had fallen across her eyes, and she left them there. As quickly as her dark amusement had bubbled to the surface, it departed.
She sat again on the bed, and he settled back into the wooden chair.
“It broke my dad’s heart when I married that asshole,” she said. “He warned me that nothing good would come of it. Though I can’t say he expected this.”
“Your husband’s involved in this somehow?”
“My ex. And no.” She took a breath, held it a moment. “We were married five months. If it wasn’t so typical, I’d have the sense to be embarrassed. Adam Hamuel, a real-estate tycoon. Planned communities in Boca Raton, that kind of stuff. It kept him busy. The land deals, the building permits, the other women.” She ran her hand along the chintz bedspread. “So when he’d travel, I’d gamble. My dad taught me to play poker.” She wet her lips. “My mom died young, so dad taught me pretty much everything. How to throw a baseball. Drive stick. But cards, Dad was great at cards.”
“What’s his name?” Evan asked. “Your father.”
“Sam. Sam White.” She blinked back emotion. “Right before I got married, Dad moved to Vegas, so I’d visit him and I’d play and play. And for a brief time — five months — I had money. A different level of money, I mean. Adam always told me not to worry, that I couldn’t spend enough to make a dent in what he earned. And so I didn’t worry. I played in those backroom games, and I drank the free booze and pushed the markers. Stupid, right?”
“Not given what you knew at the time.”
She breathed for a bit. “One day at home, I found a leopard-print thong between the couch cushions, and then I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know anymore. I called him on it, and he left and filed the next day. I’d signed a big prenup, and he just turned off the tap. Everything’s tied up in family trusts, offshore accounts, all that kind of stuff. People can hide money where you’d never find it.”
Evan gave a little nod.
“So I have a big house in Brentwood that I can’t pay the heating bill on, let alone the mortgage, a shiny leased Jag that they’re gonna repossess any day, and a marker for two-point-one million I owe to some guy on the other end of a phone number or he’ll kill my dad.”
“What’s the phone number?” Evan asked.
She recited a direct-inward-dial number, like his, which he committed to memory.
“I don’t have anything,” she said. “I told them, but they don’t believe me. Look at my zip code. I wouldn’t believe me either.” She sank to the bed, blew the hair from her eyes. “It’s my fault. I made a stupid fucking mistake, and my dad’s paying for it. Maybe right now. Do you have any idea how that feels?”
The red glow of an elevator sign. Jack’s callused hand against Evan’s cheek. The sweet smell of sawdust cut with something else.
“Yes,” he said.
“I wish you hadn’t yanked me out of the way at the restaurant. I wish they’d just shot me and let my dad go.”
“Who’s to say they wouldn’t have shot you and then your dad?”
“Oh, just let me be a martyr for a second.”
“Tell me when you’re done.”
The faintest hint of amusement firmed those lips. “I’m done.”
“What can you tell me about this gambling circuit?”
“Like I said, not much. Texas Hold’em in basements of restaurants, rented suites, like that. There was security and dealers, but I never saw the face of anyone behind it all. Even the players, we used fake names. It was impossible to tell who was the house. They were smart enough not to leave a trail.”
“How’d they find you?”
“People find you in Vegas. I was at a table. They approached.”
“Just like that.”
“I make an impression when I play.”
He asked her to walk him through whatever specifics about locations she could remember. Then he asked, “How did you find out about the Japanese businessman they killed?”
“They sent a picture to my phone. It autodeleted a few seconds after I saw it.” She smoothed an invisible wrinkle from the bedspread next to her. “A few seconds was enough.”
“You said they skinned him. But we’re dealing with a sniper, maybe a team. Why the change in approach?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “It’s not exactly my field.”
Rising to go, he realized that he knew the answer to his question already. Given the size of Katrin’s loan and her failure to deliver the money promptly, they’d gone to the next level.
They’d brought in professionals.