Hard Case Crime: Choke Hold Read online

  That had started off as another wisecrack, but by the end of the sentence I could see the truth of those words starting to sink in. Again, the flash of raw fear in his eyes.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’m in bad shape here. Even if I do make it...well....” His grip on my hand was weak and getting weaker. “Just make sure the kid is okay.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “You fucker, don’t lay this on me. You’re gonna make it. You have to, you hear me?”

  “Just promise me, Angel,” he said. “Don’t let anything happen to him. Lie if you have to, but make it sound good, willya? Please? I’m dying here.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Fine, I promise, but don’t you fucking die on me.”

  But of course he did, the selfish prick.

  I got out of the car and looked up at the cold stars. The sky seemed way too big and the headlights were the only illumination. I wrapped my arms around my body and let out a long shaky breath. I thought about the last time I was out in the desert with a dead man. I felt like I ought to cry or something, but it was as if I’d forgotten how.

  I tried to remember what it was like the last time I’d cried. To remember the person I had been back then, beaten and terrified and wailing at the unfairness of it all. The shit I’d had to do to become the person that I was now, all those things conspired to wall up any hope of tears.

  But goddamn, it had felt good to look into someone’s eyes and have them really see me. Really know me, not just some generic, forgettable name on a fake ID. So much for that.

  Truth was, I was furious at Vic for slipping so easily between the plates of my emotional armor. For making me care about him again, just in time to make me feel this.

  “Sorry,” the kid said when he returned to the car, wiping his mouth with his knuckles. “I just...”

  He gave a little self-deprecating smirk and shrug that reminded me so much of Thick Vic I couldn’t look at him.

  “No problem, kid,” I said.

  He must have seen something in my expression or body language that clued him in. “What’s wrong?” he asked, voice tightening with panic. “Is it my dad?”

  “He’s dead,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  The kid flipped out. Put his fist through the passenger side window. Screamed at the sky. Flailed and tripped and collapsed to his knees, flinging handfuls of dirt and pebbles around. I knew I should try to do something to comfort him, but I felt numb and frozen, crushed beneath the weight of my promise to Vic. I wanted to run as fast and as far as I could and never look back.

  Eventually the kid tired himself out. I walked slowly over to where he was huddled on the shoulder.

  “Let me see your hand,” I said.

  He held it out like a child with a boo-boo. I took his hand in both of mine and found that it was unexpectedly broad and massive, big enough to palm a paperback the way a magician would palm a playing card. Vic had big hands, but this kid’s mitt was so huge that holding it made me feel like a little girl holding Daddy’s hand to cross the street. The first two knuckles were crowned with old scabs and scars in addition to the fresh cuts from the safety glass. Surprisingly, the damage wasn’t all that bad. Superficial, mostly. Kid had a fist like a cement block.

  “What are we gonna do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, letting his hand drop.

  The kid was shirtless and must have been freezing in the chilly desert night but he didn’t show it. He had shaved off what little hair he might have had on his lanky torso and had the word “OUTLAW” tattooed in clichéd Old English lettering forming an arc over the tight six-pack of his belly. I could see little rims of fresh black scab still clinging to the edges of the o and the w. Again I was hit with a strange unfocused ache that might have been about Vic or a weird kind of disconnected loneliness or maybe something else entirely.

  “You need to call the cops,” I said.

  There was no way around it now. Of course, I couldn’t be anywhere near this mess when they arrived and it was a long, dark walk to anywhere, but I just didn’t see any other option. I’d promised Vic I would make sure the kid was safe. In spite of my longstanding distrust of cops, getting him into the hands of the proper authorities was the only way I could think of to do that.

  “My phone’s in my jacket,” he said. “Back at the diner.”

  I looked over my shoulder at the Bonneville. Of course I didn’t have a phone. But Vic did.

  “Wait here,” I said.

  I walked over to the car and stood for a moment by the back door, steeling myself. It didn’t help. I hadn’t thought the smell could possibly get worse, but it had.

  I nearly threw up. Twice. The phone was in the pocket on the side of Vic’s body with the fist-sized exit wound. There was a bright, ugly kind of hysteria lurking around the edges of my cool, but I managed to keep it submerged as I wiped the worst of the gore off the cheap little phone and flipped it open.

  After all that, it didn’t work. The little screen stayed gray and dead no matter what buttons I pushed. In a fit of blind fury, I flung the phone away into the cotton. The moment it left my hand, it occurred to me that maybe it just needed to be charged. Maybe Vic had one of those cords that plug into the cigarette lighter in the car. Too fucking late for that.

  I got my backpack and the kid’s saddlebag out of the car and walked back over to where the kid stood with his back to me, scuffing the dirt with the toe of his boot.

  “Is there somewhere that we could go?” I asked. “Somewhere with a phone?”

  “Sure,” he said. “My friend Hank lives about a mile down the road.” He pointed. “That way.”

  “Well then, I guess we’d better start walking,” I said.

  “We can’t just...” He looked back at the car. “...leave him.”

  “We’ll call someone to pick him up as soon as we get to your friend’s house.”

  He ran a shaking hand over his head.

  “Right, okay.”

  “Let’s go,” I said, handing him his saddlebag.

  He hefted it awkwardly, then unbuckled the flap and pulled out a notebook. He let the bag drop to the ground and started walking away.

  When he noticed I wasn’t following, he looked back. I was staring at the discarded bag. This was what he’d run back for—risked his life for—and now he was just throwing it away? “I only wanted this,” he said, lifting the notebook. “It’s stuff that I’ve been writing, you know, about my training and my feelings and stuff. I really didn’t want to lose it. But I don’t need the rest of this crap, and there’s no point lugging the stupid bag around.”

  An unmarked disc in a plain paper sleeve—a CD? a DVD? —slipped out from between the pages of the notebook. Before it could fall to the ground, he caught it with his other hand. Not quite catching a fly with chopsticks, but still pretty impressive reflexes. He stuck the disc back in the book and handed it to me.

  “Could you put it in your backpack? I can carry the backpack for you if you want.”

  “That’s okay, kid,” I said, sliding the notebook into a side pocket and wrapping my fingers tightly around the strap. “I got it.” I didn’t want to tell him that I couldn’t stand the thought of someone else taking my go-bag. “We’d better get moving.”

  4.

  I suppose you’re wondering what I was doing waiting tables in a crummy little diner on a desert highway outside Yuma, Arizona. Maybe you read the coverage of that high-profile human trafficking trial I was mixed up in and figured anybody stupid enough to testify against people like that probably got WitSec’d away into anonymous oblivion. You’d be partially right, only of course it wasn’t that simple.

  Most of the nineteen months I spent in Witness Protection aren’t even worth mentioning. It was lonely. I got set up in this grim, gray New England town where I didn’t know anyone and didn’t care. I was afraid to decorate my depressing apartment, because I didn’t want to start to feel good about it, only to have it taken away like everything else that mattered
. I missed my little house in the Valley. I missed my friends. I felt like a ghost, just going through the motions. Doing time inside my head between trips to the L.A. County courthouse.

  When you go into WitSec, they tell you not to talk about the trial, or the events that led up to the trial, to anyone you meet in the aftermath. To tell the truth, it wasn’t hard. I don’t like to talk about it. I’d rather just move on and forget it ever happened.

  Unfortunately, part of the deal with WitSec was seeing a therapist who knew the real score. Even though I wasn’t allowed to talk to random people I met, I was expected to spill my guts to this shrink. It was supposed to help me adjust to my new life and cope with all the trauma I’d been through. It wasn’t optional. The shrink’s name was Lindsey and she looked like an Italian Greyhound with glasses. I disliked her right from the first session.

  She was always making these unequivocal statements about “women in my situation” that had nothing to do with how I actually felt. She also insisted that I was in denial about my “abuse” in the adult film industry. I could never talk to her about the things that were really on my mind. About the fact I didn’t feel like a poor violated victim at all. I felt like some kind of war veteran. Like I’d been forced to turn off something important inside me to become the killer I needed to be and I didn’t have any idea how to turn it back on again. To become an ordinary civilian again, if such a thing were even possible. So instead I spent most of our time during the sessions fucking with her by telling the raunchiest, kinkiest stories about my “abuse.” I think she secretly got off on it. Poor Lindsey just needed a decent orgasm.

  Lindsey’s office was in this quaint little house in the touristy section of town. At some point in the early ’90s, the town council had voted to revitalize the area in order to attract more summer tourists. By revitalize they meant put in a Cheesecake Factory and a few shops that sold candles, ships in bottles and jewelry shaped like lobsters. They also converted a few of the old saltbox houses into cutesy office space for massage therapists, Pilates instructors and Lindsey.

  It was our regular Tuesday appointment. I had just finished my workout and hadn’t showered, as usual. I always made sure to do extra cardio on the days I met with Lindsey because it made her so obviously uncomfortable when I showed up all sweaty. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure that Lindsey was appalled by every physical function of the human body.

  I parked my crummy green Taurus in the small lot behind Lindsey’s office and got out of the car. I was a few minutes early, and dawdled on the way up. It was a postcard kind of day. Late summer. Blue sky. I wasn’t thinking about much of anything.

  I walked up the stairs on autopilot. I’d tried so hard to stay sharp, stay wary, but the same old same old makes you soft. I would have just walked right in and that would have been that, but my sneaker had come untied on the stairs and I paused to tie it in front of Lindsey’s door. That’s when I heard a horribly familiar voice coming from inside her office. A voice I was sure I’d never hear again.

  “Where is she?”

  When I heard that distinctive high-pitched Croatian accent through the closed door, I thought for a second that I had gone nuts, that all the abuse Lindsey kept going on and on about had finally caught up to me and pushed me off the deep end. Austin, the WitSec marshal in charge of my case, had assured me a thousand times that no one had ever been able to find and kill a protected witness in the history of the organization. The only way witnesses ever got killed was if they broke the rules and contacted someone from their old life. Everyone I cared about was already dead, so there was no temptation there for me. So what the fuck was going on? How could they have found me? After I’d endured endless months of this lonely gray town where everyone was white and sour and disapproving, the bastards had found me anyway. I might as well have stayed in L.A., where at least I could get decent tacos al pastor.

  There was no doubt in my mind that they had poor skinny, joyless Lindsey tied up in her immaculate, environmentally friendly and allergen-free office. If they weren’t torturing her yet, they’d start soon. They’d make her tell them everything. In retrospect, I still feel kinda bad about that. She was a pain in my ass, but nobody deserves that kind of action.

  I backed silently away from the door. Fear and rage were duking it out in my head and there was a scary moment when the rage almost won. I almost charged through the door and attacked that weaselly motherfucker with my bare hands. I knew it was stupid, fatally stupid, but there was this quiet, compelling voice in my head telling me it would be better to die with my hands around that bastard’s neck than to live on the run, always afraid. I have to admit, I still hear that voice sometimes, even now.

  But, of course, I didn’t charge in there like some action heroine out of a movie. I ran.

  5.

  Vic’s kid and I walked along the side of the dark desert road. He had a miniature flashlight on his keychain that sent out a tiny circle of bluish light. It only made the dark around us seem darker.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Cody,” he said.

  “Cody what?” It probably wasn’t Ventura, or Pagliuca either, for that matter. Pagliuca was Vic’s real last name. I had no idea what Skye West’s real name was.

  “Noon,” the kid said. “Cody Noon.”

  I was thinking about what I was gonna say when he asked my name, but he beat me to the punch.

  “My dad called you Angel,” he said. “You’re not...” He chewed his lip, eyes on his boots. “Don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but...are you a porn star?”

  I didn’t answer, but he wouldn’t let it go.

  “You are,” he said. “You’re Angel Dare, aren’t you?”

  What the hell was I supposed to tell him? There was no point denying it. I nodded, hating how raw and vulnerable I felt under that huge black sky.

  “I knew it,” he said. “Wow. You look so different. I never would have recognized you.”

  “That’s just because I have clothes on.”

  He laughed, then looked away. It seemed like he had something else he wanted to say, but whatever it was, he kept his mouth shut.

  We walked in silence for a few minutes. I could see he was starting to shiver, but trying to be a man about it. The quarter moon ducked in and out from behind swift-moving cloud banks. There was a small strip mall up ahead with no open businesses. On the other side of the road was a lot dealing in tractors and heavy farm equipment, also closed. There was a big dog in the farm equipment dealer’s fenced yard, a scrappy brown mutt that eyed us suspiciously but didn’t bark.

  As we walked, the tight, nauseous dread in the pit of my stomach seemed to get worse rather than better. I was itching to get out of town. To be anywhere but Yuma.

  After another twenty minutes of tense, awkward silence, we arrived at our apparent destination, a sorry little yellow house in dire need of fresh paint and a new roof. Or a can of kerosene and a match. The cheerful metal welcome sign out front was faded and rusty around the edges and featured a friendly, waving cartoon animal of indeterminate species that had been shot through the left eye with a small caliber rifle.

  Cody led the way up the dusty driveway and laid into the flimsy door with both fists.

  “Hank!” he called. “Come on, Hank, open up!”

  The sudden racket made my skin crawl, even though there were no other houses in sight. After what seemed like an hour, the door finally opened, revealing a man in his underwear.

  Even when I’m up to my eyeballs in paranoia, running from doped-up killers in the middle of the night, there are some things that will never escape my notice. A body like that guy’s is one of those things.

  He was just a few inches taller than me, with a compact but hard and powerful build. A build like that wasn’t just for show. A build like that meant business. He had broad shoulders with a large, crescent-shaped surgical scar on the right. Strong arms and thick, muscular thighs. He hadn’t bothered to shave the hair of
f his chest and belly like Cody had. His tighty-whiteys had been scrubbed so many times that they were worn thin, nearly see-through. I liked what I could see through them. When my gaze finally made it up to his face, I was more than a little disappointed.

  He had a face that looked like something the tribe who made those stone heads on Easter Island might have come up with if they’d attempted a portrait of Chuck Norris. His large nose had been repeatedly smashed and flattened. His eyes were so pale they were barely blue and he had an equal length of blond stubble on his head and his heavy jaw. His crooked ears were cauliflowered, puffy and swollen up like they had hemorrhoids, the right more so than the left.

  “Dammit, Cody,” he said. “You got any fuckin’ idea...” He looked over Cody’s shoulder at me, then dipped his chin, shifting his gaze to his bare feet. “Scuze me, ma’am. I didn’t realize Cody’d brought company.”

  His voice was deep, distinctly Southern and full of gravel. I had the feeling if he’d been wearing a hat, he would have taken it off.

  There was a beat of awkward silence before he seemed to realize he was in nothing but skivvies. He blushed and began to stammer, then slammed the door.

  “Just give me a minute, willya?” he finally managed to say through the closed door.

  When he opened the door again, he was dressed in black track pants and a t-shirt advertising some kind of musclebuilding supplement.

  “Why didn’t you say you brought company,” he said to Cody. “Well, ain’t you gonna introduce me?”

  “Angel,” Cody said distractedly. “This is Hank ‘The Hammer’ Hammond.”

  I cringed, wishing I’d thought to ask him not to use the name Angel.

  “Just Hank’ll do,” Hank said with a kid’s big guileless grin. He seemed to have completely forgotten about his previous embarrassment.

  He put out a thick, calloused hand that was stiff and permanently curled as if never more than two inches from a fist. I shook it. It felt like an inanimate object.

  “Charmed,” I said, looking back over my shoulder. “But I really think we ought to go inside.”