Chapter 11 #2
“So like I said, there was this big company party on the 18th of May, at the Hyatt Regency. One of Gerald’s minions, Arlen Miller, comes up to me, puts his arm around my shoulders and starts telling me how lucky I am to have hooked up with a guy as smart as Gerald.
He was so drunk you could have lit his breath.
I didn’t really listen at the beginning and I’m sorry now that I didn’t.
But all I wanted was his heavy arm off my shoulders and to get home.
He was talking about something that happened in April in Kabul and how Gerald was The Man.
And that The Man had taken forty million.
Then Gerald looked at him and this guy turned paper white. Gerald looked scary mad.”
Harry knew what happened when men like Gerald Montez were enraged. Everyone turned to him.
“Harry,” Nicole said, blinking. “Did you just growl?”
He shook his head sharply, getting rid of some bad thoughts. He picked up Ellen’s hand and brought it to his mouth. “Remember you’re safe now.”
Sam and Mike looked at each other again. Harry didn’t give a shit. This was his woman. One thing for sure—Sam understood. He’d tear the throat out of anyone who threatened Nicole.
“Can you try and remember more about exactly what this man, this Arlen, said?”
Ellen sighed. “I’ve tried over and over, but he was so drunk.
Half of what he was saying didn’t make sense.
Arlen mentioned another name, but I haven’t been able to find any mention of him in any database.
Malowski. Or Makorski. Something like that.
Arlen was really really stewed.” She wrinkled her nose.
“And he had a sort of speech defect, like a lisp. He sprayed spittle, ew. I was too busy trying to stay away from his breath and the spray.”
“Nicole,” Sam said.
“On it,” she answered, going to Harry’s laptop.
She switched it on and disappeared. To all intents and purposes, Nicole was no longer in the same room with them.
Harry was really really good with computers, but Nicole was better at research.
That hurt. She ran a translation agency and was used to carrying out major research for her translations.
Her agency had a list of expert collaborators that spanned the globe, men and women who did online terminology research for a living and they communicated daily.
She also had low level clearance to check government databases.
As a result, Nicole could find anything.
“So you ran when this guy showed up dead?” Sam looked at Ellen.
“Yeah,” she answered softly. “I spent three months on the road, and I ended up in Seattle.”
Three months on the road. Harry didn’t have to ask what that had been like. Three months from anonymous motel to flea-bitten boarding house, because those were the kind of places that didn’t require ID. Sleeping lightly, looking over her shoulder.
Sam leaned forward. “So Montez got to your agent. How’d he know where to look? You kept Eve under cover.”
Ellen shook her head. “I honestly have no idea. I was really careful. The records were produced by a shell company that I set up very carefully. Registered in the Caymans and with no connection to me. Paying my taxes took real creative accounting, let me tell you.”
“Were you this big draw at the bar where you worked?” Sam asked.
“No. The bar’s clientele is…well, let’s say messed up. Most of them don’t pay too much attention to anything. I can’t imagine anyone there connecting the waitress who sang a few nights a week with Eve. Except, of course, for Kerry.”
“Kerry?” Mike swivelled his head, frowning.
“Dove,” Harry and Mike said at the same time.
Mike’s frowned deepened. “You guys met? Talked? What are the odds? That’s not good.”
No, it wasn’t. Kerry was supposed to stay undercover forever. Never let her secret out.
Ellen turned to him. “I don’t know, Mike.
The Blue Moon is sort of tailor-made for…
for women like us. The owner wants us off the books and he doesn’t care at all what our background is.
If we can do the work—and it’s not rocket science—he pays on time and asks no questions at all.
The customers are mainly sad men who don’t even look at us.
There aren’t that many jobs you can get without showing up on any books. And Kerry was…she was lonely.”
“If she’s one of ours, she’s not supposed to talk.” Mike’s deep rumble held disapproval.
For someone who slept around a lot, Mike didn’t seem to have a good handle on women. They were hard wired to talk.
“She recognized I was like her.” Ellen gave a sad smile. “She said if I was ever in danger to get to San Diego and she gave me your card.”
“Guys,” Nicole interrupted. She lifted her fingers from the keyboard and looked triumphantly at them. “I think I’ve got something.”
Seattle
It was raining. It seemed like it was always raining in Seattle.
For a moment, Kerry Robinson missed San Diego.
She thought with longing of the warm springs, hot summers, beautiful falls and mild winters.
It rained rarely, and often the weather had the good taste to rain only at night, like in Camelot. She missed it so much.
On the other hand, if she were still in San Diego, she’d probably be dead. There was that.
She hopped from puddle to puddle trying to keep her shoes as dry as possible. Working an eight hour shift in wet shoes was miserably uncomfortable, she knew from bitter experience. She had two pairs of shoes, neither of them rain-worthy.
Once upon a time, she’d had three hundred pairs of shoes. She’d had an entire closet for her shoes. Those days were gone.
A drunk crashed into Kerry while she dashed from storefront to storefront, trying to keep dry. She barely managed to avoid falling into a huge puddle that had accumulated in a pot hole in the sidewalk.
The drunk mumbled something and staggered off, uncaring of the rain dripping off his lank, greasy long hair and soaking the tattered green sweater.
No raincoat, no boots, dank rotten smell.
He looked homeless. No doubt he’d settle on some corner and panhandle until he got together the money for another beer.
Or another whiskey. Or maybe even to score some drugs.
Kerry knew that there was a taxonomy to despair, but hadn’t quite gotten the classification system down pat yet.
No doubt a cop could tell whether the smelly man staggering down the street was a drunk or a junkie or just plain crazy, but she couldn’t.
Not yet. It filled her with desperation that sooner or later she’d be able to distinguish all the stripes of horror down here at the bottom of society’s ladder.
It was all so very far away from La Jolla.
No homeless people in her old world. Everything and everyone in it had been pampered and manicured to within an inch of their lives.
No out-of-control drunks, no junkies, no crazies.
No poor people at all, unless you counted the help.
The ones who kept the gardens green and trimmed, the houses spotless, the streets pristine.
It had been a wonderful world and a wonderful life, if you didn’t count being beaten up on a regular basis. That had sucked.
Her husband had loved her, so very much. So much that he couldn’t stand for her to be imperfect. Any imperfection had to be punished. For her own good, of course.
For three years, Kerry had gone to a different hospital with a different story each time, but there were only so many hospitals in the area. When she found herself at the same hospital for the third time in a year, she mixed her story up. Most well-to-do matrons don’t walk into doors that often.
A social worker had visited her in the hospital and had been questioning her when Tom walked in.
Tom had, of course, turned on the charm.
He had a special spigot, 24 carat gold. He was tall, handsome and well dressed.
He managed to be elegant without coming off as a dandy.
He was almost dazzlingly handsome, well spoken, with charm in spades.
The rich knew how to smooth over any kind of unpleasantness.
He’d come into the hospital room, understood the situation in a glance and had taken over the conversation.
Within five minutes he discovered that the social worker enjoyed rock music, promised her front row seats for the upcoming Springsteen concert at Petco and escorted her to her car.
The look he’d given her as the hospital door closed behind her terrified her.
He’d been escalating as her errors multiplied.
Now her mistakes included the way she spoke, dressed, ate and breathed.
More or less everything she did was wrong now, and subject to punishment.
And his rages were getting worse. She knew she wouldn’t survive the next time.
Alice—the person she’d been before becoming Kerry—had shifted painfully on that hospital bed and had been surprised to hear a crackling sound. A card, which obviously the social worker had managed to slip onto the mattress as she was saying goodbye.
On it had been a beautiful bird in flight, a number and the words CALL NOW in big block print.
The number didn’t have 619, the San Diego prefix.
Alice didn’t know where the number was, who the person was that the social worker thought could help her.
She didn’t know anything, except for one thing.
If she stayed, she’d be dead within the week.
So, with a broken wrist, a damaged liver and a slight concussion, with an IV line with glucose and a powerful antibiotic running into a needle on the back of her hand, she’d escaped.
She’d pulled the IV line out, pulled her clothes out of the little closet that had been provided and ran.
If Tom had had any idea that she’d have the nerve to run away, he’d have taken her clothes away, no question.
But she’d never run away. That was the quickest way to a fatal beating she knew of.