Skin Deep

I tried to accelerate, but my foot was already pushed to the floor. To the left the Pacific rolled in as black as blood. Something like drowsiness kept slipping over my consciousness, and it took too long for me to identify it as defeat. The minute I'd found Saffron dead I should have known I couldn't take Nana home.

You've killed her, a voice said in my ear.

I shook my head and shoved vainly at the accelerator.

There was so much blood, the voice said. Hansel's headless body popped into my mind's eye. She's dead, the voice said.

'Fuck you,' I said to the voice, and turned left into Encinal Canyon. The turn had caught me unaware, and Alice almost spun out. It had been more than thirty minutes.

I parked partway down and ran the rest of the way to the house. From the driveway the house looked dark, but there was enough moonlight to show me that Toby's car wasn't there. There was a car there, though, pulled crookedly into the drive with both its front doors open.

I knew whose car it was.

The tide was out, so I went around to the beach side of the house, climbing over slippery, still wet rocks, falling once before I got to the picture windows. The curtains were drawn, but lights burned inside. Then there was a flash, like small-scale lightning. But from inside. Then another.

He was taking pictures.

A surge of pure adrenaline joined forces with another flashbulb to carry me through knee-deep water and up onto the beach to the front door. It was open.

It would be. She couldn't walk, not after all that blood. He'd had to carry her inside. He didn't plan to stay long.

I listened: not a sound. No more flashes. Then I heard footsteps across a hardwood floor, and a door opened somewhere in the house.

Now.

My wet running shoes made squelching rubbery sounds as I moved across the dark entrance hall toward the pale rectangle of light that fell from the archway leading into the living room. The room was empty and not empty.

No one was standing there, but what looked like a heap of clothing was crumpled in the corner between the bookcases. Multiple images of Toby's face grinned down from the wall at what was left of Nana. Black hair and red blood. One slender arm was outthrown. It was broken midway between the elbow and the wrist.

The next thing I remember, I had gathered her in my arms and was picking her up. I had carried her before, but now she was horribly light. I wondered how much all that blood weighed. Her head lolled back, and a savaged face caught the light. It was impossible to tell if she was alive or dead. Her eyes were swollen and open and empty. She looked like she could see through walls. I took two steps toward the front door.

'Put her down,' said a voice from behind me.

A tremor ran through me, and I turned with her dangling from my arms. The door to the beach was open, and Tiny stood in it. He bloomed there, gigantic in white, framed by the darkness. A little nickel-plated gun gleamed in his hand.

'I got your clue,' I said in the most level voice I could manage. 'Nice touch.' The front of his white shirt was stained brown. Butcher brown.

'Give her the credit. She'd already written my name on the screen when I knocked the door down. All I had to do was change two letters. But I never figured you'd get home so early, much less turn up here before I was gone. Now what am I going to do with you?'

'Is she dead?' Nana hadn't stirred.

'She wasn't supposed to be. She was supposed to call the cops and tell them to come here and then be dead.' He gave me a grimace that he thought was a smile. 'Downers,' he said, giving his head a ponderous shake. 'Bad dope. Get you out of control sometimes.'

His pupils were enormous, and his fat face was sheened over with sweat.

'Like at her apartment?' I said.

'She was supposed to be there,' he said in a reasonable tone. 'I guess I just got pissed off. Put her down now.' He wiggled the little gun. 'I don't want to confuse things,' he said. 'No prints but Toby's, nobody but Toby. That was the idea.'

'Tiny. The idea's already gone wrong.'

'Why? Because of you? Just stay where you are, I'll figure you out. You'll be as dead as she is as soon as I work out where to put you.'

'That doesn't give me much incentive to cooperate.'

'You will, though. As long as you figure you've got a chance to stay alive, like maybe you can outsmart me, get the gun or something, you'll do anything I tell you. I would, in your shoes. And now you're going to put her down, right where you found her.'

I looked into his flat black eyes for a long moment. There was nobody inside. I knelt slowly.

'You can drop her,' he said in the same calm, toneless voice. 'She won't feel it. Drop her on her head if you like.'

I laid her down as gently as I could. Her limbs splayed out gracelessly, angular and lifeless. Matted hair masked her face.

'Why her?' I said, standing up again. 'I know why you killed Saffron, but why her? What the fuck did she ever do to you? She liked you.'

'It wasn't me she did it to,' he said. 'I wouldn't kill anyone who hurt me. I don't matter that much. I never really mattered.' A furrow appeared between his brows as he replayed what I'd said. 'Hold on. Stop. You know why I killed Saffron?'

'Sure. Because she and Toby killed Amber.'

His face twisted and hardened. 'You knew that? You knew that, and you were still on their side?' His mouth worked convulsively for a second, and then he spat on the floor. 'That makes it easier,' he said. 'It wasn't going to be hard anyway, but that makes it even easier.'

'I didn't know it until tonight,' I said. 'They didn't mean to.'

'You think that makes any difference to Amber?'

'Tell me what happened.'

His eyes filled with laborious cunning. 'I thought you knew,' he said slowly.

'The swimming pool, Saffron's swimming pool. It happened in the swimming pool.'

The fat little eyes became alarming-still empty, but alarming. All force, no intellect: he looked like a one-man holy war. 'Who told you? Toby?'

'Nobody told me. I guessed part of it from the way Saffron behaved, but I didn't figure it out until tonight, when I went to Saffron's apartment house and saw the bottom of the pool.'

'They played a game with her,' he said dreamily. The gun sagged in his hand. 'Toby bought a bunch of loads at the Rack, and they had a make-believe contest, you know? Who could take the most loads. Except they only pretended to take theirs, they pretended to take the same loads over and over. It must have been real funny. Amber, she took four or five. And she was already pretty fucked up.'

'From junk,' I said, measuring the distance between us. The gun was pointed at the floor. Tiny swayed.

'Junk,' he said. 'I hate junk. Oh, you don't know. You don't know how many times I tried to get her to quit. I even cried.' He closed his eyes, but before I could move he pulled them open again. 'That's not easy for a Lebanese, crying in front of a woman, but I cried. I begged her to quit. I even hit her a few times, but that just made it worse. She started using it as an anesthetic.'

'You tried,' I said.

'I never tried anything harder in my life.' He shrugged his massive shoulders. 'I loved her.'

'But you set her up with Toby that night.'

'That was different. That was business. She understood the business. Toby was an important customer. Customers were customers. I was, I was supposed to be, something else. Something different.' He swayed again. The gun hung limp from his hand.

'And they killed her,' he said conversationally. 'After they got her so stoned she couldn't walk, they played a game. You know Simon says? Little kids' game. They played Simon says. First she had to close her eyes and touch