Hailey's War

“And then we go get her,” Payaso said, “Trece style.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But after that, we can’t really stand down. When we have Nidia, we’re going to be in essentially the same situation that Skouras’s guys are in now. They’re going to be looking for her, so we’ve got to keep her under wraps, safe, and healthy. And she’ll need medical care during the last weeks of her term.”

“And someone’s gotta birth the baby,” Payaso said.

“Yes,” I said. “We have a couple of choices there, none of them ideal. The best choice is probably to take her to an ER. If we’ve lain low enough, and Skouras’s men don’t know where we are, he can’t have every maternity ward in the state being watched.”

“What about computers?” Heartbreaker said. “Could he have people in his organization who could hack into, you know, hospital computers?”

I hadn’t thought of that. “Beats me. But I don’t think it’s going to help us to start thinking of this guy as the master of the universe. We’ll get too paranoid to plan anything.”

“But if we can’t go to the ER,” Payaso said, “maybe we could jack a doctor, get him to birth the baby. I heard about some vatos that did it for a gang member who got shot. They let the doc go afterward. They didn’t hurt him.”

I’d heard those stories, too. “That’s one way,” I said slowly, “but I’m not wild about sticking a gun in the face of someone who’s spent his or her life trying to help sick people. It’s a cliche, but I don’t want to become like Skouras to defeat him.”

I watched Payaso, to see how he took this rejection of not just his idea but his gangster ethics. He didn’t look mutinous.

“Speaking of that, though, there’s a middle way,” Serena said. “You said there’s got to be a doctor who’s looking after Nidia. If he’s there when we come in and grab Nidia, we could take him, too, keep him until her due date.”

“One-stop shopping,” I agreed. “Tempting, but the problem with that is controlling the doctor over a period of days or even weeks. I know some of you guys have jacked people before. What’s the key to controlling a vic in that situation?”

“Fear,” several voices said.

“Right. So the key to keeping the doctor in line would be keeping him-or her, I guess-pretty well psychologically traumatized, as well as never giving him any privacy in which to escape. You may think you’re ready for that, but there’s a difference between keeping a jacking victim under control for two minutes, and keeping someone intimidated for two weeks. You may not be as prepared as you think. You may not like who you have to become.”

There was a moment of silence around the circle. Then Payaso said, “What about us delivering the baby? No doctor. Women have been having babies for centuries without help.”

I exchanged glances with Serena. People loved to say that about childbirth, and they never seemed to apply it to other medical situations. No one ever says that people have been having infections for centuries before we had antibiotics. I only said, “That’s something else to think about.”

I didn’t want to oppose Payaso too much in one meeting. There’d be time later to argue against that idea.

* * *

Another conversation in Serena’s bed:

“So, prima, you gonna tell me where you got that ten K?”

“No.”

“I thought we were familia now. No secrets between us.”

“Everyone’s got secrets,” I said. “You have secrets from me, I’m sure.”

“Like what? Ask me what you want to know.”

I rolled onto one elbow. “When you were in high school, with your head shaved, dressed cholo, you did a lot to prove you were one of the guys. You told me that.”

“Sure.”

“When teenagers are banging hardest, that’s usually when they do their killings. They walk into parties or up to porches and blast away. Often they get away with it.”

“That’s what you wanna know? If I did that?”

“I’m just making a point,” I said. “That’s something I’ve never asked you. So we do have secrets between us.”

“You’re assuming the answer is yes,” she pointed out. “If I didn’t, then I don’t have a secret, do I?”

“That’s true,” I said, “but it’s not an answer.”

“So if I tell you straight out,” she said, “are you gonna tell me where you got the money?”

“No.”

“Stalemate,” she said.

thirty-three

Right away, out of the money CJ gave me, I put another month’s rent in the mail to Shay, who undoubtedly was pissed at me all over again for disappearing without word. I was sure he’d never offer me work again. I could live with that; I just didn’t want him to pitch my things out in the street.

Then I spent the rest of that day at the library, looking up articles on Tony Skouras.

As Jack had told me, Skouras had been profiled several times in magazines, and he spoke passionately and articulately about his ancestry, his proud fallen family, and his need to grab with both hands at the life he’d come here to attain. But he scoffed at the rumors that he was some kind of gangster.

“In the twenty-first century, that’s an outdated business model,” Skouras said in one article. “Intimidating people you need on your side, always looking over your shoulder for law enforcement and the IRS-what businessman would possibly want to run his operations like that? There’s just no need for it anymore.”

I almost believed him, but I had two bullet holes in me that said otherwise. The times never really get any less rough; the masks just get more civilized.

Straighter, briefer news stories detailed how Tony Skouras sold off the South Asian arm of his imports line-“the profit just wasn’t there”-and mounted a successful takeover bid for a rival shipping line. Nothing in these stories told me anything useful, except that one cited his lawyer, a Nicolas Costa.

At that point, I went outside and called San Francisco directory assistance, getting a number for Nicolas Costa, attorney at law. I programmed it into my cell. Just in case.

In addition to the business stories and the profiles, I found two short articles on Skouras’s heart attack and subsequent quintuple bypass surgery several years ago, and some reviews of his seafood restaurant, Rosemary’s. Skouras was quoted in one review as saying that he and his sons used to fish for their own suppers back when he owned a house in Bodega Bay. The quote made it sound very past tense, though, and I figured he’d probably sold the place long before.

But then, in one piece on Rosemary’s, there was mention of a fund-raiser held there, a six-course black-tie dinner that Skouras had held. The proceeds were to go to the family of a firefighter up the coast in Gualala. The firefighter had been killed on the job and left three kids behind, and it had come to Skouras’s attention because he was having a vacation house built in the steep, forested hills outside of town.

I felt something stir down in my stomach, and I wrote Gualala on my notepad.

“Time for a road trip,” I said to Serena when I got back.

“Yeah? You find something?”

“He used to have a beach house in Bodega Bay, and to be thorough, I’m going to check property tax records there,” I said. “But more recently, he was building a house in Gualala.”