Hailey's War

“I’m wearing a half-open jacket over a shoulder holster with the gun under it. I pull up alongside Skouras’s car, blast away, I’m gone. One of you could be waiting for me somewhere nearby. I cut through an alley or a parking garage, dump the bike and the helmet, get in a car with you, and we’re gone. Skouras’s guys will know who it was afterward, but they already know who I am. No one’s at risk who wasn’t before.”

Of course, it was possible that it wouldn’t work, that Skouras’s guys would kill me, either on the spot or later. That possibility was part of my calculations. I do X, he does Y, I get killed. It was still weird to me that I could think so dispassionately about my own death. I’d learned not to talk about it that way, though, not even in front of someone as jaded as Serena.

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“We’ll refine the details as we go,” I said.

But she was shaking her head, looking out at the hills and the horizon. “This is a detail that can’t be refined away,” she said.

I hesitated, grasping her meaning. “An assassination is unacceptable to you?”

“You doing it is unacceptable to me,” she said. “You’re not a murderer, Insula.”

I pulled my food basket toward me and picked up one of the few remaining french fries, even though I wasn’t hungry. “In a way, I’m avenging my own murder. His guys shot me to death in Mexico, or at least that’s what they thought. They dragged me off the highway so no one would find me. It doesn’t absolve Skouras that I didn’t actually die. He wanted me to.”

“But you didn’t, prima.”

“We haven’t got a world of options here, Serena.” I was frustrated.

We were silent a moment. Then I said, “Look, we’re not going to throw this plan together in twenty-two hours, anyway. When Costa calls back, we’ll stall. I’ll try to work out a deal in which Nidia stays with us until the baby’s born. I’ll tell him we’ll work out a hand-over then.”

“He won’t go for that.”

“He doesn’t know where we are. He’ll have to go for it or stick his thumb up his ass.”

“No, he’s going to stick a gun up your ass when he finds you, that’s what he said on the phone,” Serena said.

“Well, it’s the best plan I can come up with,” I said. “We just need to stall while I go back to San Francisco and do enough surveillance on Skouras to get his routines down. Then I do the hit, and Nidia and her baby are safe.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The baby’s value to Skouras is strictly personal. Once he’s gone, there’s no reason for his soldiers to keep this quest alive. They’re just hired guns. If no one’s paying anymore for the baby to be found, that’ll be the end of the search.”

“Hired or not, the Greek’s guys might take his murder kinda personal,” Serena pointed out.

“They won’t blame Nidia for that.”

“You mean they’ll go after you.”

“I’ll be the one who hit Skouras,” I said. “They’ll know that.”

Serena said, “I’m still in unacceptable-losses territory with this.”

I pried the lid off my drink and stirred the sepia-colored mix of Coke, water, and the remnants of hollow ice- machine cubes. “I don’t know anymore who started this,” I said. “When I drove into that tunnel, I was a civilian noncombatant, and those guys shot me point blank. But then we took the fight back to them when we went after Nidia. We didn’t have to do that. But however you look at it, we’re engaged now. It’s a war. And if someone’s got to die before it’s over, I think it should be Skouras rather than Nidia or one of your homegirls or me. Can we agree on that?”

She nodded.

I crumpled my napkin and threw it into the plastic basket. “Come on, then, let’s head back.”

On the drive back to Julianne’s place, I said, “So what was Trippy saying about me?”

Serena looked blank.

“You know,” I prompted, “that I’m not really one of you guys?”

“Oh, that. Don’t worry about it. She’s young and insecure. She’s my lieutenant, but then you came back to L.A. and took your beating, and suddenly you’re at the center of the biggest mission we’ve ever done. She feels pushed aside. She’ll get over it. When we get back to L.A., I’ll do some Trippy maintenance.”

“You should,” I said, braking for a stop sign, then pulling through. “What she’s saying wasn’t wrong. I’m not really one of you. I’ve said that all along.”

She shrugged, not wanting to relive the argument we had on the phone.

“Hey,” Serena said, “slow down, you’re gonna miss the turnoff.”

She was right. I braked as hard as I dared on the snow-wet road and turned, steering us up through the gauntlet of trees.

When we got to the trailer, Cheyenne came out to meet us. She looked shadowed and worried.

“What’s up?” Serena said.

“Nidia isn’t feeling good,” she said. “She’s having cramps.”

“Cramps?” Serena asked. “Or contractions?”

forty-six

The one advantage to Nidia going into labor early was that it blew away our previous, half-baked theories about jacking a doctor to attend the birth. Nor did Payaso bring up his idea that Nidia could give birth to the baby alone. Instead, he did the guy thing: He turned the whole situation over to the women. Serena and I quickly decided to take Nidia to a hospital.

I did the driving. Nidia was in the passenger seat, which was pushed back to accommodate her belly and also reclined into as comfortable a position as possible. She’d gathered her hair into a loose ponytail off her face, which was faintly beginning to shine with perspiration. But she didn’t seem to be in any distress, just tense and inwardly focused.

Serena and Cheyenne were in the backseat. No one was talking. I was concentrating hard on the road ahead of me. The day was still warm enough, yet I imagined a rogue patch of ice causing me to slide the GTO disastrously into a ditch. The sun was low enough now that I had to fumble for my sunglasses.

At the hospital, the parking lot wasn’t even half full, a good sign that Nidia wouldn’t have to wait long to be seen. I parked us in a space that said AMBULANCE ONLY and cut off the engine. Cheyenne and Serena climbed out of the backseat, noisily closing the doors behind them. I didn’t open my door, because I would have to find a more permanent parking space for the GTO. That’s when I felt Nidia’s small hand clamp around my wrist. I glanced over, and her alarmed eyes met mine.

“You’re coming in, aren’t you?” she said. “I only trust you.”

This was something new. I’d never heard her say anything like it before.

Serena opened the passenger-side door. “Ready?” she prompted Nidia. “Let’s go in.”

I said, “Give us a minute.”

Serena shrugged and gently closed the door. I struggled to think of the right response. “Of course I’m coming in,” I said. “It never occurred to me not to.”

She didn’t take her hand off my arm, the knuckles slightly pale. She said, “Back when I thought you were dead, when I was in that house in the hills, I prayed for your soul, every day. That God would take it into heaven.”

Maybe she was frightened because of the difficult hours of labor that lay ahead of her. Or maybe she was just emotional because her baby was finally hours from being in her arms. But I felt certain that she wouldn’t lie about this. And I would have been lying if I tried to pretend that the knowledge didn’t touch me, somewhere I hadn’t known I was still vulnerable.