"Shut the door," I said, "and check around to make sure there's no one else here."

16.

I think Quentin was living off the books, like I did back in Los Angeles. It was the only way to explain the difference between the run-down neighborhood he lived in and the inside of the one-bedroom apartment that apparently was his. It looked better inside than out, furnished almost as I'd imagined, with a black leather couch and a gla.s.s coffee table on the warped wooden floor, and on the coffee table a razor blade and a few telltale whitish grains to attest to Quentin's bad habits. There was a table with two straight-backed chairs in the dining area, under a hanging lamp, and a forty-inch TV stood on a black, nearly empty bookcase along the wall. Other than that, the room was spartan and unadorned, unless you counted, at the moment, Quentin Corelli himself on the floor, hands and feet lashed with telephone cord and a narrow leather belt, respectively. There was a trickle of blood that ran from his left nostril to his upper lip, but it had stopped flowing on its own. I hadn't stanched it. I didn't particularly want to touch him. I didn't fear him, but I didn't want to touch him.

Now he was awake and looking at me, and it was clear he still didn't recognize the stranger with the bruise on her cheek.

Serena came out of the bedroom. "We're alone," she said.

Quentin looked from me to her, back to me, and got it. "You," he said. "f.u.c.king A."

"Hi, Quentin," I said. "Seems like old times, doesn't it?" Like Gualala, where I'd gotten the drop on him once before.

His shoulders jerked as, for about ten seconds, he tried to get his hands free. Then, frustrated, he sank back down on the floor. I wasn't surprised that he didn't start yelling. Anyone near enough to hear would call the cops, and people like Quentin didn't do cops.

I said, "Did you think I wouldn't figure it out and come visit you?"

This is where, if he were innocent, Quentin should have said, Figure what out? He didn't, and that made me smile. I said, "Where is she, Quentin?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, b.i.t.c.h."

I picked up his coat, a good-quality leather jacket, from the couch. It was the only item he'd taken off; otherwise he was still crisply dressed in his work clothes-charcoal trousers, white shirt with a fine gray stripe, square-toed black leather shoes. He hadn't even gotten blood on his shirt. Yet.

His coat yielded a cell phone and a key ring; I already had the gun he'd dropped in our brief fight.

"Glock makes a nice gun," I said, holding it up. "I hope you wore gloves when you loaded it. It'd be a really bad thing if I walked out of here with this gun and later I shot someone with it and your prints were on the casings, eh?" I paused. "I guess you know how I know that."

Quentin's golden eyes flickered briefly with an emotion I was pretty sure was malicious pleasure. Even in his precarious current situation, he was happy I was so badly jammed up.

I toed him in the ribs, not hard.

"Pay attention, Q," I said. "The more immediate point here is that both I and my a.s.sociate are heavily armed"-I nodded to Serena, who was sitting on the spine of the couch, with Quentin's discarded coat, wallet, and cell at her feet-"and you're not."

He looked at Serena and said to me, "What is it with you and Mexicans? Can't you get any white people to hang out with you?"

Serena didn't say anything, not rising to the bait. I sat on my heels and put the muzzle of the Glock against his face. "I got no love for you, you know that," I said. "But I've got bigger things to do than mess with you, so if you just answer one question for me, you're gonna be home free. Here it is, for the washer-dryer set and a chance at the bonus round: Who'd you sell my ID and gun to?"

"f.u.c.k you, b.i.t.c.h."

I'd figured it wouldn't be that easy. Time for Plan B. "Hand me his phone," I told Serena.

She did, and I brought up the call log. "Look at this," I told Quentin conversationally. "Missed calls, received calls, dialed calls. What am I gonna find in here, Q? Anything interesting?"

His face was stiff and angry, but that didn't tell me much. I turned my attention back to the gray-green readout.

He should have deleted this stuff more often. His call log went back well over a week. I scrolled backward. I recognized the number for Skouras Shipping-"work" to Quentin-and also Joe Laska's private cell, identified as "JL." The other names and numbers meant nothing to me.

I kept scrolling back until I got to the window of time that interested me: Friday afternoon after three-thirty. Stepakoff's death could have been no earlier than that, according to the SFPD's timeline. Sometime in the hours afterward, the grifter had collected all her things and vacated the Eastman house. Around that time, I thought, she might have called Quentin. If he'd given her the ID papers and the gun both, then maybe he would be her go-to guy, the one she'd call when the plan went to h.e.l.l and she was looking down at the body of a dead cop.

That afternoon, at 4:07 P.M., Quentin had missed a phone call from someone identified just by a nine-digit phone number, not by name. Seven minutes later that same person had called again, and Quentin had picked up.

I scrolled back. The other phone call from that number had come in on the next day, Sat.u.r.day. Nothing since then.

I nudged my chin at Quentin. "Watch him," I told Serena. "I'll be back in a minute." I didn't want Quentin overhearing this conversation. Certainly I didn't want him to be yelling in the background.

I walked out Quentin's front door and glanced around. No one else was visible nearby. I emerged from the entry cave and sat on the front steps, largely out of view of the street.

A gray cat sprang to the top of the fence alongside Quentin's building. It gave me an insolent stare, decided I was no threat, moved on. I looked down at the phone, still registering the suspect phone number on the screen. I pressed the key with the green telephone receiver on it, and the screen flashed the message CALLING.

On the second ring, a woman's voice answered. "Quentin? What's up?" She sounded young. There was a little edge of caution in her voice; it wasn't flirtatious.

I, though, took care to make my voice quick and light as I said, "Hi, sorry, this isn't Quentin, I'm Jenny, from Joe Laska's office. Who have I reached?"

I said all that in one breath, trying first to set her at ease with a name I thought would be familiar to her, Laska's name, then not giving her time to think before making my officious request.

"This is Brittany," she said. She sounded uncertain but not yet suspicious.

"Oh, good. Quentin asked me to call and ask you a question. He wants to know if you've gotten rid of everything that links you to-this is what he said-'Hailey and Violet'?"

There was a long pause. As the seconds stretched out, I felt something hopeful rise in my chest.

She said, "Who did you say you were?"

"I'm Jenny, from Joe's office." I wanted to ask her if she was still in San Francisco or nearby, but that would clearly give this away as a fishing expedition.

She said, "I think I need to talk to Quentin personally."

"I'll have him call you," I said.

"Why did he-"

I broke the connection but didn't immediately go back inside. I stood up for a moment, breathing a little quicker than usual.

People who believed in astral projection sometimes referred to something called the "silver cord," a line of energy that connected the unconscious body to the traveling spirit. Some said the same cord, faintly visible to the truly aware, connected people whose lives were deeply intertwined. For a brief moment, while I'd had her on the line, I'd almost felt that same thing, a nearly tactile connection. Our lives were linked because we'd briefly shared the same ident.i.ty, and now we faced the same potential fate: a death sentence.

And for about twenty-eight seconds, according to the log on the screen of Quentin's phone, I'd created a cord between us. I'd had her on the line, giving me information. It wasn't Magnus Ford who'd done that or any of the cops in the Eastman-Stepakoff task force. It had been me.

Quentin's phone rang in my hand, shaking me out of that reverie. Ignoring the phone, I went back inside.

"Guess who that is?" I told Quentin brightly, holding up the phone as the ringing continued. "Brittany's very anxious to talk to you." I moved closer, stood over his supine form. "I know her name and her cell number now. I know you were helping her with this. Tell me the rest and I'll leave. You'll never see me again."

Quentin glared. "Oh, you're definitely going to see me again. You're gonna die screaming, b.i.t.c.h."

I lifted a shoulder. "Last year you said I'd be dead by Christmas. What are we shooting for now? Easter's over." I watched his face. "So tell me what I need to know."

He was silent.

I hadn't expected this to be easy, but I sighed aloud for the sake of dramatics. "Quentin," I said, as if weary, "you hate women. You know it, I know it, little girls on bicycles with sissy bars probably sense it when they ride past you on the street. Why protect this one chick? Just give her up and this doesn't get messy. I'll call Laska, and he'll come and cut you loose. No harm done."

Except to his ego, and to guys like Quentin, ego was a lot. Particularly when its bruises came at the hands of a female.

"Go to h.e.l.l," he said.

Since he'd woken up to find himself at the mercy of an old enemy, Quentin just hadn't seemed as scared as I'd have hoped. Even now he was glaring, resentful, but it was a frustration with a sly edge. He was sure we wouldn't really hurt him and, more than that, sure that we'd make a mistake and he'd get the upper hand soon enough.

"Serena," I said, "can I have a cigarette?"

She dug them out, the pack of Marlboros and the lighter. I tapped one out of the pack, lit up, exhaled a cloud of start-up smoke. I held out the cigarette to Quentin but yanked it away when he tried to snap at my hand.

"I had that move scouted, didn't I?" I said. "I know you, Quentin. And you probably think you know me. You think, because of last winter, that I'm hung up on doing the right thing, yeah? But that was then." I took the cigarette in my right hand and then, watching his eyes, slowly stubbed it out against the stump on my left hand, where the nerves still hadn't grown back.

"This is now," I finished.

Quentin's eyes showed white at the edges; for the first time, I had his full attention. I thought I'd reached him.

Then he said, "That's not what I remember about last winter." He smiled. "I remember you weren't such hot s.h.i.t then. You were down on your knees sucking on my crank like it was sugarcoated. You-"

I really don't remember much about what happened next. I think I heard a sound inside my head, a faint crunch like when you bite into a particularly crisp apple, and then my vision swam red except for a narrow window through which I could see Quentin's face and the knuckles of my own fists, white with fury.

17.

"I'm feeling a lot better," I said meekly.

I was sitting in Quentin's bathroom with my back against the hard curved ceramic of the tub. My arms rested on my knees, my knuckles skinned. Cold water dripped down my spine, water that Serena had squeezed from a wet hand towel down the back of my shirt. Oddly enough, it did have a calming effect.

Serena, unimpressed with my claim to be recovered, was leaning against the closed bathroom door. On her wrist I could see the marks from where I'd fought her attempt to pull me off Quentin. I hadn't drawn blood, though I had broken skin-there were long pink lines edged with torn white skin where my short, blunt fingernails had clawed at her. On my shoulders, the tendony midpoint between neck and shoulder, I could feel where I'd have light bruises from how hard she'd initially grabbed me.

"Sorry," I told her, maybe not for the first time. Like I said, a few minutes were a blur, lost to me.

"Nothing to be sorry about," she said flatly. "He's a waste of oxygen. But he wasn't going to tell us nothing from a f.u.c.king coma."

"Well," I said, "he'll talk to us now."

But Serena's next words surprised me. "I don't think he will."

I gave her a quizzical glance.

"I know his type. He's had beatings before. That's part of what he gets paid for, not folding at the first threat of a little pain. Plus," she said, "now he's seen you lose it. Yeah, you got in a few licks, but you lost it. He's gonna keep jerking you around." She lifted her weight from the door and came to sit on her heels in front of me. "Give me my cigarettes back, okay?"

I handed over both the matches and the cigarettes. She tapped one out of the pack and then struck a match and lit up. As I watched, she inhaled until the cigarette's end glowed, then exhaled smoke, then handed the cigarette to me.

"Come on," she said, standing. "We're gonna get it outta him. But you've got to give me the lead on this."

"Meaning what?" I said, getting up from the floor.

"Meaning I'm going to do what we've gotta do to get it out of him," she said.

"Yeah, but how?"

"Just trust me."

I'd tried, I really had, to shed the way of thinking that West Point had trained into me. But now my first thought was that an officer never turns his or her back on what his or her troops are doing. Deniability, one of my COs at West Point had said, was a cowardly term for a cowardly age.

Serena read my mind. "Hailey," she said, "don't be thinking what you're thinking. Not now."

"What am I thinking?"

"Duty and honor," she said.

"Give me another chance. I can get it out of him," I said.

"No, you can't. And if you did, you couldn't live with yourself." The cigarette was still smoldering in her hand. "Come on, Hailey. What do you think you brought me along for? Just to pump the gas and buy the food so you could stay out of sight? You knew this mission might come down to something like this, something I can do and sleep at night afterward and you couldn't."

Serena opened the bathroom door. I followed, still holding the cigarette she'd given me.

Quentin eyed us both sourly as we came back into the living room, but he said nothing.

Serena nodded toward the table. "Get a chair over here, and let's get him up in it."

"You touch me again, you're gonna die, b.i.t.c.h," Quentin said. I ignored him and pulled one of the straight-backed chairs into the center of the room. Avoiding his angry eyes, not looking at the red pre-bruise marks on his face that I'd made, I grabbed him by the collar, Serena grabbed his hips, and together we wrestled him up into the chair. He was quieter than you might expect for someone in his situation, and he didn't put up a fight, but I understood why: ego. Even if some of his neighbors were at home at midday, he wasn't about to scream for help like some civilian. He didn't want help from upstanding normal people, and he certainly didn't want cops. Quentin was waiting for us to make a mistake-like weak, stupid females inevitably would-and then he'd make us pay.

But for now Serena had found extra electrical cords and a few of Quentin's belts, and she was tying his ankles to the chair legs, then strapping him to the chair.

He looked up at me. "You hit like a girl," he said. "I've been hit harder by interesting ideas."

"Hold that thought, Q," Serena said, straightening up. She went into the kitchen, then the bedroom. We heard her rummaging noisily. Her disembodied voice, from the bedroom: "Gross."

"What?"

"I found the p.o.r.n."

"I'll take your word. I don't want to see it."

Quentin snorted.

Serena returned to the living room, carrying a red metal tool chest. She set it down on the floor and snapped it open. "Gangster toolbox," she said, sifting through the items inside. "Lock picks, extra cartridges for the gun, handcuff key but no handcuffs-and what's this?" She raised her face to Quentin's and smiled. "You ever hear the expression 'What goes around, comes around'? Time for you to pay for what you did to my friend last year."