19

Exposed by the blaring light outside Diane’s building, Flip waited for someone to exit or enter so he could tailgate his way in. No one moved on the silent street. He felt naked out here.

Finally someone came into the lobby, walking like he was wearing new feet. Drunk, almost certainly. He pushed through the door before noticing Flip.

Flip grabbed the handle of the door. The drunk eyed him out of his haze and mumbled, “Howyadoin?” before teetering on.

Flip couldn’t wait in the bright lobby for the elevator.

His knuckles ached every time he gripped the handrail as he went upstairs.

It took too long to get her to the door. The hallway walls seemed to shout his name every time he knocked. When she finally opened the door, she stared at him for a moment as if she’d never seen him before.

“Come in. Quick.” She backed away to let him in, and he looked her over. An oversize T-shirt reached down to the tops of her thighs.

She folded her arms. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

“I got no place else to go.” He closed the door and turned to her.

“What’s the matter with your apartment?”

Flip couldn’t bring himself to look in her eyes.

“What did you do, Flip?”

“My PO—he was going to put a tether on me.”

“A what?”

“One of those ankle things where they know where you are all the time.”

Her eyes shifted to his ankles. He wanted to duck behind the sofa.

“So?”

“So I couldn’t let him do it, could I?”

Her eyes leveled. “What. Did. You. Do?”

He went to the sofa and sat. She stood before him, waiting.

“I had to hit him.”

Diane rolled her eyes and turned, her arms flapping at her sides.

“I couldn’t let him do it, Di. It would’ve ruined our whole plan.”

She faced him and pointed to her chest. “Why didn’t you just cut it off after he left? Why’d you have to hit him?” She stopped. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

He looked at his hands. The last thing he wanted to tell her was that he’d lost his cool, that he’d just wanted to hit the guy. “No.”

Diane folded an arm across her chest and brought up a hand to her lips. Flip couldn’t look up at her. As she stood thinking, her toes flexed against the carpet. Her toenails were painted pink.

“Well, you can’t stay here. Did anybody see you come in?”

“No. Look, just one night. Tomorrow night I’ll find someplace else.”

She went to the window and edged the drape aside an inch to peek out. “Nobody can see you here.”

“Nobody will. You know me. I’m the invisible man.”

Diane turned, and Flip’s eyes finally traveled up to her face.

“It’s not that I don’t want you here, darlin’.” Her posture settled, arms loosening, and she came to him. A hand came to his arm, stroked. “But until we get this thing done, we have to be really careful. Come here.”

She pulled him to the sofa and sat next to him. “Let me think a minute.” She tapped a pink fingernail against her front teeth. “I know.” She rose away from him, and went into the bedroom. He heard a drawer slide, and in a moment she was back. “Here’s a hundred. There’s a place down off Sepulveda, past Venice Boulevard. Go there for tonight, and we’ll figure something out tomorrow.” She handed the money to him. “This’ll be plenty.”

He fingered the cash, looking up at her. “You’re putting me out.”

Coming to him, sliding onto the sofa next to him, a hand to his face, she pleaded. “Flip—darlin’—don’t you know this is hard for me, too? Being apart from you all this time? After you just got out? It’s agony. But it’ll be just a few more months. Soon we’ll be together. Really together.”

She brought her lips to his. They searched him out, made him melt inside, and he saw that this was what he had needed, what he had really come here for—not a roof to sleep under, not safety, but this.

She ended it. Her tongue crept over her lips, and she smiled. “Just a few more months.”

He wanted to taste them again. He bent toward her. She gave them to him for an instant and was gone.

“Come on, now.” She rose, and he followed her. She opened the door a crack, then eased it wide enough to look up and down the hall. She turned to him. “Be quick. Don’t be seen.”

One more kiss. He wrapped an arm around her, considered slamming the door and carrying her into the back room.

She pulled back. “Just a few months.”

His breath was quick, his heart slamming against his ribs for want of her. But this job was more important. It would get them where they wanted to be. “All right.” He stepped past her and peeked outside before turning to her one final time. “How much you think we’ll take?”

She came close again and pressed her body against him. “Flip, darlin’, we’ll be papering our walls with Benjamins.”

* * *

Pain knifed through Tom Cole’s skull. “Ohhh.”

His head rolled. Something was in his mouth, hard and heavy, its edge cutting at his tongue. He spit it out, and it fell onto his neck and off to the side.

He put a hand to his face, felt slickness with the consistency of oil.

But it wasn’t oil.

His eyelids split like cracking eggshells, and the reality of place and time nudged into his mind.

Flip Dunn’s apartment. A dirty carpet mushed underneath Tom’s wounded head where it lay in a puddle of his own blood. The reek of the unwashed residue of Flip’s life drifted in the air underneath the crushing pain in Tom’s skull.

Next to his shoulder, he saw what had been in his mouth. The ankle monitor. Flip had cut it off and stuffed the end of one of the straps in Tom’s mouth.

Nice touch.

He lay unmoving, taking inventory of his body, listening but hearing no sound beyond the cymbals in his ears. One by one he tested his limbs and found them functioning, felt for injuries in places other than his head but discovered none.

He tried to lift his head. It rang, throbbed in pain. The apartment swirled around him, tilting, walls flying. He lowered his head back to the carpet. The ceiling gradually slowed its spin, easing into a stained blur.

His eyes wouldn’t focus.

He went for his cell phone and felt for the number one key, pressed and held it for a 911 emergency call.

The operator came on and he struggled through the conversation, digging the address out of his scrambled mind. He set the phone down, and the operator stayed on, her voice drifting through his ringing ears, distant.

He wondered how he could have been so stupid. Old and lazy, that’s how. Show up at the home of a high-control parolee just a few weeks after he gated out, put yourself at his feet. . . . Gun or no gun, he should have had backup, should have called Flip into his office. Something.

But why didn’t he kill me?