“You should see the other guy,” he replied with that stingy rind of a smile on his bruised lips. He opened the driver’s side door. “Let’s get the hell out of here before any more of them show up.”
I was about to go around to the passenger side and get in the car when I looked down at the rhino. He was unconscious, face down on the concrete and making a sort of snoring sound, arms and legs twitching like a dog chasing dream rabbits. Without even realizing I was doing it, I raised the gun and aimed it directly at the back of his head. My whole body felt cold and numb.
“Angel,” Malloy said, putting a hand on my shoulder.
I shook him off and centered my aim again. I thought of Sam, of Georgie and all the shoots we did together. The fresh potato salad she always made and the time Sam put that strap-on dildo around his forehead and ran around the set claiming to be a unicorn looking to put his head in a virgin’s lap. I dropped down on one knee beside the man who’d killed him and pressed the snout of the gun against the curve of the fucker’s skull.
“Think for a second, Angel,” Malloy asked quietly. “Are you sure this is what you want?”
I could hear the sound of Malloy’s voice, but somehow it didn’t seem to relate to me. All I could hear was that scream, that horrible high-pitched, almost child-like scream that had torn up out of Sam’s throat when the rhino shot him in the knee. The only thing I was sure of was this kind of delirious, narcotic fury that gripped me and wouldn’t let me go. I pulled the trigger.
The rhino was dead before I could put a second hole alongside the first, but I felt I needed to do it anyway, for Sam. The pistol’s kick resonated endlessly along the long bones of my arm and my unprotected ears rang and then Malloy was grabbing me, hustling me roughly into the car and peeling out.
“Give me the gun,” he said as he hung a sharp turn onto Moorpark.
I let him pry my fingers gently off the pistol’s grip and then stash the gun under his seat.
I felt cold and muffled, as if I were underwater. The familiar, franchise-laden Valley landscape seemed hyper-detailed and implausible, like something drawn by a comic book artist on speed, but my own inner landscape was blurry and unclear.
If I’d been unsure how to feel about Malloy after witnessing what he had done to that thug in Vegas, how was I supposed to feel about myself now? That guy in Vegas had been trying to kill Malloy. Malloy was simply defending himself, even if he ultimately went too far. Me, I had shot and killed an unconscious man. Sure, he was trying to hurt Malloy, maybe kill him. He had shot Sam in the knee right in front of me, if not killed him, too. But the guy had been out like a baby when I’d shot him. What sort of person did that make me?
As if reading my mind, Malloy arched a silver eyebrow at me.
“Guess I was wrong about you,” he said.
I remembered Malloy saying that he thought I wasn’t the cold-blooded execution type. Tabby had said basically the same thing. Were they wrong? Had the events of the last few crazy days changed who I was or just allowed me to finally become who I had been all along?
There was something different in Malloy’s guarded eyes when he looked at me now. I couldn’t tell if it was admiration or wariness.
“Pull over,” I hissed, breaking eye contact and clutching the dashboard as I was broadsided by a brutal wave of nausea.
I barely shouldered open the door in time to puke violently into the leafy gutter just before the corner of Riverside and Van Noord.
Malloy waited out my bout of dry heaves. I felt fairly close either to passing out or turning inside out when I finally slammed the door, leaned back and rested my pounding head against the seat.
“It’s no big deal,” Malloy said, putting the car in gear and pulling back out into traffic. “Lots of guys puke the first time.”
He reached under his seat and for a crazy second, I though he was going to pull out the gun. Instead, he came up with an unopened bottle of water and offered it to me without taking his eyes off the road. I accepted the water gratefully and took a deep swig. It was warm as tea, but I needed it.
“I was thirty,” Malloy told me as we waited at a red light. “It was two days after my birthday. I was still a rookie back then. Got a kinda late start on the job.”
He stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and punched the dashboard lighter. The light changed and he hit the gas.
“Anyway,” he continued, unlit cigarette bouncing as he spoke. “My partner and me, we got a call that this crackhead left her newborn baby in the toilet at a Carl’s Jr. Left it in there just like you’d leave a dump.” He shook his head. “We found her right around the corner, sitting on the ground, hitting the pipe like nothing happened. She was still bleeding down her legs. When my partner confronted her, she acted like she didn’t hear him. Then when he took a step closer, she pulled out this knife. I don’t mean some kind of pocketknife, I mean a big old kitchen knife like the kind on TV that cuts through tin cans. She stuck that knife right in Laimert’s calf. So I shot her.”
The lighter popped out. Malloy took it out and touched it to the end of his cigarette.
“I thought I was OK about it at first. I mean she was just a skinny little thing, barely more than a kid, but she was out of her fucking mind. She drowned her own baby in a dirty toilet and stabbed a cop. She had it coming, no doubt about it. But two hours later I was typing up some paperwork and all of a sudden, I saw her again, lying there on her side, and I puked right on the typewriter.”
I looked up at Malloy. I was so surprised by this unexpected soliloquy that I didn’t know what to say. Lalo Malloy, spontaneously sharing an intimate anecdote. With me. Something subtle and strange had happened between us. I had no idea what to make of it.
I looked out the window. Sherman Oaks became Valley Village and then North Hollywood as we zigzagged back toward Malloy’s place. I drank little sips of water, trying to find my voice, trying to set aside what I’d done and how totally alien everything felt and focus back on the problem at hand.
“What the hell happened to Lia?” I finally made myself ask. “Do you think she saw the weasel and his pal and took off?”
“Maybe,” Malloy said. “Maybe they already got her and were just waiting for us.”
“Now what?”
“Now we need to get that 2257 information you mentioned for PDM Video,” Malloy said. “See if we can get a drivers license on Lia.”
“We can probably get it online at your place,” I said.
Malloy nodded and ground out his cigarette in the ashtray.
“Do you have a breath mint or something?” I asked.
“Glove box,” Malloy said.
I opened the glove box and dug through maps and napkins and things until I found a tin of Altoids. I popped it open and took one. Malloy turned onto Hollywood Way. As the candy dissolved on my tongue, the details of the events in the parking lot started to dissolve as well. Part of me felt it was important to hang on to them, to savor them in all their ugliness. But there was another part of me that was just as glad to let them go.
We drove in silence. Malloy turned onto his street and parked a few doors down from his place. I followed him along the sidewalk and over toward the door to the apartment complex.
“You know,” I said. “This is gonna sound really weird, but I’m kinda hungry all of a sudden.”
Inexplicably, Malloy froze. He did not reply. His body language turned simultaneously tense and fluid, like a cat that had just spotted a mouse. He slowly reached out and wrapped his fingers around my upper arm.
“What?” I asked.
“My wallet,” he said. “I—”
Before he could finish the sentence, there was a sharp, sudden Fourth of July pop and a puff of plaster dust exploded from the wall about an asshair away from the left side of Malloy’s head.
“Go!” he said, shoving me ahead of him so hard I nearly fell.
I have no idea how I managed to keep my feet under me and Malloy behind me as we barreled down the sidewalk with those firecracker pops going off all around us. That cliche you always hear about how everything goes into slow motion at times like this is kind of true, but also kind of not. The world around me was suddenly way too
