Unscrewed Page 13

  I turned back, watching the reunion in fascinated silence. The mob looked orgasmic, shaking hands, lending condolences, leaning in close as if to catch the old man’s merest scent. As for the senator, he appeared like a wizened lion, wounded but indestructible in the face of adversity.

  “Damn bastard can smell it from across the globe.”

  “What? What can he smell?”

  “Old money. Young blood,” Rivera said.

  “Maybe he’s just being hospit—” I began, but just then an unidentifiable noise issued from him. I turned, but his gaze was locked on his father.

  “What was that?” I asked, but he was already pressing past me toward the crowd.

  “Rivera.” I grabbed his sleeve. “Wait a minute. Rivera!”

  He stared at my hand for a full five seconds, then shifted his live-ammo gaze to mine. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, McMullen?”

  “Listen, Rivera.” I was holding on like a hyena to an impala’s leg. “Maybe this isn’t a great idea.”

  He narrowed his eyes and his lips simultaneously in a parody of a smile. “You sacrificing yourself for the good senator?”

  “Sacrificing.” I laughed, and glanced around, scouting for reinforcements. My conservative sling-backs were planted firmly in the plush ivory carpet, and my fingers were curled tight in the crisp fabric of his sleeve, but I really wasn’t sure I could hold him back if he decided to do something stupid, which I was pretty sure he was planning on doing. “What are you talking about?”

  His grin sliced up a notch. It looked a little cannibalistic. I’ve never been that fond of cannibals.

  “The senator,” he snarled, leaning close. “You willing to take a bullet for him, too?”

  “You’re not a bullet.” I chuckled. It was a stupid thing to say. I admit it, but it was a small miracle my mouth worked. I couldn’t expect as much from my mind.

  He snorted and tugged. I went with him, still hanging on for dear life.

  “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Captain Kindred appeared from nowhere. For a man the size of a small country, he could move like an elf. He grabbed Rivera’s free arm in a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt.

  Anger roared across Rivera’s face. “This is none of your business, Captain.”

  “The hell it isn’t. You want to act like a goddamn idiot, you do it when the mayor’s not standing around taking notes.”

  Rivera straightened slightly, stiff with rage. “You taking the senator’s side, too, Kindred?”

  “Taking sides?” the captain snarled. “What the fuck do you think this is, Rivera? The damned prom?”

  “I think it’s a fucking joke.”

  “You see me laughing?”

  I personally wondered if he’d ever laughed.

  “I’m only going to tell you this once, Lieutenant.” Silence thrummed between them for a second. “Leave this room now, or don’t bother showing up at the station tomorrow.”

  Tension cranked up tight. The two stared at each other, darker than sin, madder than hell.

  Then Rivera drew a breath, shifted his shoulders. “I’ll be at the funeral,” he said, and turned away.

  Kindred watched him leave, then blew out a heavy breath before turning toward me. “You with him?” he asked.

  “What?”

  He jerked his head toward the door. “You two together?”

  I breathed a laugh. “No. I—”

  His scowl darkened to dangerous.

  My lips stuttered to a halt. It was like lying to God. “I have no idea,” I said.

  He watched me. I fidgeted like a scolded crossing guard. “The lieutenant’s got some troubles,” he said. “But there are reasons he…” He shifted his brooding gaze to the senator, then slowly back to me. “Just watch yourself,” he warned, and walked away.

  I stared after him in stunned silence.

  “Are you in love with him?”

  I turned numbly toward the voice. Rosita Rivera was back. It was like a revolving room, tossing people at me at erratic intervals.

  “What?”

  “My son,” she said. “He has the hot head, but you love him nevertheless, sí?”

  “Mrs. Rivera…” Was now the time to demure? Faint? Bolt? “I think you have the wrong—”

  “We must get to know each other better.”

  “What?”

  “Come to my house. Tomorrow, for dinner.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “I am the wonderful cook. My Gerald has told you that, no?”

  “Yes.” Actually, he really had. “But I’m…I…I don’t…” Her arched brows were raised high, her painted mouth pursed. “I’m busy,” I said.

  “Nonsense. You must eat. I live in Sierra Madre.” She rattled off an address, then spotted someone through the crowd and hurried away.

  I stood staring like a beached whale.

  Someone laughed. I was pretty damn sure it wasn’t me. “You are so screwed.”

  That wasn’t me, either. I turned. Rachel stood beside me. “What?”

  She glanced toward the senator. He was watching us over the heads of his adoring fan club.

  “The Rivera trifecta,” she said.

  “I don’t know what you’re—” I began, but just then someone roared in fury.

  I jerked toward the door.

  Something struck the outside wall, seeming to shake the very floor beneath my feet.

  I stood in stunned disorientation, but Kindred was already streaking past me, gun drawn, dark face intense.

  Lucidness struck me like a blow. “Rivera,” I whispered, and leapt after him.

  The door ricocheted against the wall. It was dark outside. Two bodies were tangled half on the concrete, half on the grass, arms and legs thrashing wildly.

  Kindred cursed. He was holding his weapon in both hands.

  I hissed a prayer.

  “Get the fuck off me or I’ll kill you!” someone snarled, but I couldn’t decipher who it was. They were breathing hard, cursing and scrambling.

  “Like you killed Legs?” The words were guttural, all but lethal.

  “Not my fault your friends keep dying, Rivera.”

  “You fucking son of a—”

  “Shut up, the both of you!” Kindred snapped. “Graystone, toss out the gun.”

  Gun! Terror held me motionless for an instant, but suddenly I was snatching my phone from my purse. My hands were shaking. I don’t remember dialing.

  “Throw it out, Detective. Jack…” Kindred’s voice was almost soothing. “Let him up. It’s not too late to salvage this. Get up nice and slow. We’ll talk things through.”

  “Nine-one-one, this is Colleen.” The voice in the phone startled me.

  “Colleen!” I squealed, but just then the world exploded. A bullet zinged through the air. Shards of plaster rained over me, spattering on my head.

  I screamed. The phone bounced from my hand as I ducked behind a nearby tree.

  “Fucking bastard,” one of the men growled.

  “Goddamn—” answered the other, but the words were interrupted by the meaty sound of flesh against flesh.

  Heavy breathing rasped the night air. I chanced a peek around the tree trunk. Someone was staggering to his feet. The other body lay still.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Lieutenant?” Kindred snarled.

  A gun dangled from Rivera’s fingers. I could recognize him now, could see the sharp-etched outline of his face, the feral light in his eyes.

  “Put the piece down.”

  Rivera said nothing. His chest was heaving. His jacket sleeve had been ripped at the shoulder, exposing the dove gray shirt underneath.

  “Lieutenant.” Kindred enunciated carefully, as if he were speaking to a child. “Put the—”

  “I didn’t kill her, Captain.” Rivera’s voice was almost too low to hear.

  Silence echoed through the crowd of mourners who had gathered outside, then, “You think I’m an idiot?”
Kindred’s voice was lower still. “You think I’m a goddamn moron?”

  Rivera shook his head, like a small boy being chastised. I could see now that blood was dripping down his forehead. It was diverted by his left eyebrow, then flowed in a dark eddy along the hollow of his cheek.

  “Then give me the gun.” Kindred sounded tired suddenly, like a father who’s missed too much sleep.

  “Put me on the case.”

  “This case?” Kindred laughed. It was little more than a weary snort. “Are you out of your fucking mind? I’ll be lucky to keep you out of jail. Just hand over the gun before someone blows this so out of proportion I can’t—”

  But just then a cop car careened around the corner, lights wheeling, sirens suddenly full blast. Another came from the opposite direction, spraying colored lights across Rivera’s face and gleaming off the gun that dangled chest-high from his fingers.

  14

  You don’t really know a person till you’ve spent some time in their panties.

  —A client, who, for obvious reasons, would just as soon remain anonymous

  HOLY CATS!” Laney said. She was perched on the edge of her desk, peeling an orange.

  I nodded and paced the narrow length of my reception area. It was empty except for Laney and myself, and her longbow, of course—ever vigilant.

  “So they took him away in the squad car?”

  “Yeah.” The memory still made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

  “Front seat or back?”

  I shook my head. It had all happened in an instant. One minute he was there, the next he was gone. Kindred had wasted no time removing him from the scene. But what had happened after that?

  “What happened after that?” Laney was reading my mind again.

  “I don’t know. I grabbed my phone and took off before anyone could decide it was my fault.”

  “Did you try calling him?”

  “No answer.”

  “How about his dad?”

  “The senator?”

  “Does he have another dad?”

  “I can’t call the senator.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…” I did a jittery thing with my hands. I’m not normally a jittery person, but I’d dreamt about Rivera the previous night. He’d found out that I’d made the 911 call, and he hadn’t been happy. Then he’d morphed into an alligator. Which was odd. I’d always figured he’d turn into a wolf if he were a shape-shifter. He’d be all dark and bristly and kind of sexy in an animalistic kind of way. “Because he’s the senator,” I said, then paused, scowling. “And his number’s unlisted.”

  “His mother?” she asked.

  I closed my eyes and did a full-body sigh, trying to relax, but my nerves kept jumping. I would have sold my hair for a pack of cigarettes and a get-out-of-lung-cancer-free card. “She invited me to dinner.”

  Laney’s perfect brows shot toward her hairline. “Mrs. Rivera wants to have dinner with you?”

  “Or to have me for dinner,” I said. “I’m not sure which.”

  “I haven’t actually heard that the Riveras are cannibals.”

  I stopped pacing. “What have you heard?”

  “About Rosita Rivera?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know. Not much. There was that scandal about the senator and his aide, like I mentioned before. When I saw him with his wife at the premiere, everything seemed fine, though. But maybe that was just their public image and didn’t reflect—”

  “You saw them?”

  “Uh-huh.” She continued peeling her orange. Laney doesn’t eat real food like Doritos and cheesecake and the kind of stuff that makes life worth living.

  “Together?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “That was months ago, Mac. That’s a long time in Mac Land. Andrew Bomstad hadn’t dropped dead at your feet. The brooding lieutenant hadn’t accused you of murder. You were just another nonfelonious citizen of L.A. Updating you about the Riveras would have been like telling you I met Grayson McCouch.”

  “Who?”

  “Exactly. Anyway, I think the Riveras still attend some social functions together.”

  I pondered that while I munched on a section of her orange. It was organic. And not bad for something that hadn’t been processed to within an inch of its life.

  “Was that before or after the senator was engaged to Salma Hayek?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Did Mrs. Rivera look as if she wanted to kill Mr. Rivera?”

  “It’s hard to say.” She was still masticating on the first section of her orange. Give Laney an environmentally friendly lettuce leaf and she’s busy for half an hour. “Viggo Mortensen was signing autographs.”

  “Holy crap!” I remembered Viggo from Lord of the Rings. The hair, the attitude, the body.

  “I know.”

  “Was he wearing chain mail?”

  “Blue jeans and a fringed leather jacket. He’s an equestrian.”

  “Of course.”

  “And a poet.”

  Despite my jumping nerves, I drooled a little. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the orange. Viggo had made one hell of an Aragorn. When I was a kid, I’d imagined myself as a hobbit. After seeing the movie, I’d wanted to become an elfin princess, or a royal codpiece.

  “Screw Rivera,” I said.

  “A little late for that,” she said. “He might be in the slammer.”

  “Laney!” I scowled and ate another orange slice. “What would your dad say?” Her father is a Methodist minister, which may have prompted the dearth of swearing and fornicating and other all-American activities on Laney’s part. But now she just laughed.

  “I think what you should be concentrating on is that the Riveras travel in the same circles as the king of Middle Earth,” she said.

  I tried to focus, but the thought of Viggo in leather, writing haiku, was almost more than I could bear. Which made me realize a sobering point: “He was right,” I said. “I am out of my league.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not royalty, a codpiece, or a politician.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I glanced out the window, giving the parking lot a glare. “So what am I going to do about Mrs. Rivera’s invitation?”

  “Don’t go.”

  I snapped my attention back to her. “What are you talking about? I have to go.”

  “Then why did you ask?”

  “Because you’re supposed to talk me out of it.”

  “When have I ever talked you out of anything?”

  “There was that time I was going to do a three-day liquid fast.”

  “You’d already opened the Lay’s bag before I intervened.”

  “I was planning to pulverize them and drink them like a shake.”

  “You’re sick.”

  “What am I going to do about Mrs. Rivera?”

  “Don’t do anything stupid, Mac.”

  “Like fasting?”

  “Like getting yourself killed.”

  “Damn, I never thought of that. I should have talked to you before the Bomstad fiasco.”

  “I’m serious. Salina Martinez is dead. There’s no reason to assume Mrs. Rivera wasn’t involved.”

  I gave that some sagacious consideration as I finished off her orange. She wasn’t going to eat it anyway. “The same could be said of a hundred other people.”

  “Just be careful.”

  “Yeah, I could tell a police officer where I’m going. Or a U.S. senator. Oh, wait, they’re both murder suspects.”

  “Just bring some protection.”

  I eyed her up. “The longbow’s kind of bulky. And it doesn’t go with my pants.”

  “I was talking about your Mace, genius.”

  A car pulled into the parking lot. My first client, spot on time. “I’ve got to find out what’s going on.”

  She scowled.

  �
�I’ll be okay, Laney. I promise,” I said, and wandered into my office.

  Nine hours later, as I trundled east on the 210, I wasn’t feeling so cocksure. My mind was racing like an overloaded freight train and my stomach felt queasy.

  I don’t know what I expected from Rosita Rivera’s house, but I was surprised from the first moment I spotted her address. It was written in scrolled numerals on the ceramic-tiled pillars that formed the ends of her wrought-iron fence.

  It was a simple home, not huge, but certainly not small. The most striking thing about it was the roses. They grew in wild abundance, a mixed rainbow of colors mingled in riotous harmony. They nodded behind the green iron fencing and smiled beside a pond where koi flitted about in the dappled sunlight. They lined the cobbled walk that marched to an arched front door, looking tumbled but graceful against the muted adobe.

  I couldn’t help but think about the lone cactus that overlooked the rock in the dust I call my front yard. Had it not been for Rivera, I would only have the rock.

  I rang the doorbell, my heart doing a masterful tango in my throat.

  “One momento.” The yell came from deep inside the low-built hacienda.

  I waited, holding a bottle of Veuve Clicquot like a dagger in my right hand. I had spent a full hour standing in Fuhrman’s Liquors deciding on the brand. Veuve’s had looked the classiest. But in actuality I had no idea how it tasted or if Veuve was the name of the champagne, the vineyard, or the guy that gave samples in little plastic cups. My stint at the Warthog hadn’t exactly familiarized me with fine spirits. But I knew how to belch the “Star-Spangled Banner” backward. So far that skill hadn’t come in as handy as I had hoped.

  The door opened a few scant inches, then, “Christina!” Mrs. Rivera suddenly appeared in the doorway, clapping her hands together like an ecstatic schoolgirl. “You have come.” She was dressed in a pair of white capris that hugged her like a second skin. Her hips were generous but shapely, her thighs slim. The capris were embellished with a multicolored sash at the waist. Strings of cheery garnets dangled at her dark-skinned calves. Her blouse was red, sleeveless, and showed a good deal of smooth, mocha cleavage. Her sandals had two-inch platforms and braided leather thongs that disappeared between her scarlet-painted toes. In comparison, I felt as big as a hot air balloon and as dull as dirt. “I am so glad. Come in. Come in.”