Crush (10 page)

Rush moved from room to room. There were only three: living room, bedroom, and kitchen. All empty.

“So is it?” Amelia asked.

“What?”

“Secure.”

“Well, as a rule a secure house is located a maximum distance from other structures, with a natural barrier of walls or trees, covered parking for vehicles, easily controlled access points.…”

“So, no?”

“So, no.”

She pulled a teak box from a shelf and opened it, offering the contents to Rush.

“Want some?”

“Never while I'm working.”

She shrugged and rolled herself a joint. “I'm sleepy.”

He stretched out on the sofa. “Get some sleep then. I'm not stopping you.”

“What are you doing?”

“Protecting you. Get some sleep.”

She looked at him, as if a thought just struck her. “Wanna blowjob or something?”

“Never while I'm working.”

She shrugged and headed off to the bedroom.

A couple of hours later she was back. Rush was sitting on the sofa, eyes wide open, just as she'd left him.

“Don't you ever sleep?”

“Never while I'm working.”

“Is that your mantra?”

“It is while I'm working.”

She sat down opposite him. She'd changed into a basketball jersey and shorts.

“The Clippers?” he asked.

“Dad's a Lakers fan,” she said, as if that explained it all. “So how come you can afford all those cars and that garage and everything?”

“Same as you, Mom's trust fund.”

“That guy in the loft, he doesn't look like your brother.”

“He's not.”

“Then why.…”

“You don't pay me to answer questions.”

Miffed, she got up and crossed the room. “Tony said you were moody.”

“I can't think of him as ‘Tony.' He was always ‘Guzman' on the job.”

She pulled a CD off the shelf and made a face. “‘Guzman' is too clumsy a name for a pretty guy like him.”

Rush chuckled. “I'd love to have seen his face when you called him ‘pretty.'”

She turned to him, suddenly serious. “He liked it.”

Rush took that in. Guzman and Amelia Trask. Something about it didn't ring true.

She was at the CD player now, fiddling with the dials. “Hey, somebody screwed up all my settings.” The CD drawer slid open.

Rush just had time to grab her and throw her across the room when the stereo exploded.

They beat the second blast, diving through the windows in a shower of shattering glass and into the water of the canal, before it tore the door off its hinges and the house went up in flames.

NINE

T
he house was a smoldering wreck. Cops and firefighters milled about—the cops waiting for the smoldering to stop so they could go in and do their work, the firefighters waiting for the smoldering to stop so they could go home.

Rush and Amelia sat on the ground. The houses on either side were perfectly intact, but Amelia's mother's house was just gone, like a missing tooth in a hillbilly's smile. From somewhere in the wreckage, a phone was ringing.

“It was all I had left from my mom,” she said, quietly.

“I'm sorry,” was all he could think to say.

“Is your mom still alive?” she asked.

Rush shook his head. “Somebody killed her.”

“Who?”

“Don't know.”

“I bet you'd kill him if you found out.”

“Yep.”

A fat guy in a suit peeled off from the group around the house and approached them. He had a nice face.

“Hey, this is your house, I understand?” he asked Amelia, like he was embarrassed by the whole thing.

“It was,” she said.

“Well, yeah. I'm Detective Lambert.” The phone kept ringing from inside the rubble, and Lambert turned his head barked back to the group, “Somebody find that damn phone!” Then he was back to Amelia, all concern. “Do you have any idea who that is?”

“It's probably a dissatisfied customer. My brother's website is down.”

“What—?” Lambert was confused. “No, no, not the phone. The bomb. Do you have any idea who would.…”

“Detective Lambert?” Lambert looked up to see two guys in much more expensive suits than his, standing there with arms folded.

“Do I know you?”

They flashed their badges. Feds.

“Agent Hendricks,” said one.

“Agent Ross,” said the other.

“We're taking over this crime scene,” said Agent Hendricks. Or maybe it was Ross.

“The hell you are!” barked Lambert.

“This relates to an ongoing federal investigation,” said Agent Ross. Or maybe it was Hendricks. “The Trask case.”

Lambert swore under his breath. “Do I at least get a kiss before you screw me?”

“Assholes,” said Amelia, who was apparently familiar with Messrs. Hendricks and Ross.

“Miss Trask,” said one, “is this where your father kept the files?”

“Is that why you blew up the place?” asked the other one.

“What files?” asked Amelia, not entirely convincingly. “You're stupid.”

“The real GlobalInterLink books,” said the other one.

“The ones that'll put your father away,” said the first one. “Could be on a computer or a flash drive. Could be on an MP3 player. Could be anywhere.”

Rush spoke up. “I don't think this has anything to do with GlobalInterLink.”

The two of them looked at him, only now acknowledging his presence. “And who are you?” asked Hendricks or Ross.

“My security man,” Amelia said, proudly.

The agents looked at the exploded house, then back at Rush. “Doing a good job so far,” one of them said.

Rush ignored the dig. “You ever heard of Tarzan Ivankov?”

“Tarzan?”

“Yeah, everybody asks that,” Rush said. “Except your brother,” he said to Amelia. “He already knew the name.”

Amelia shrugged. Hendricks/Ross said, “So?”

“Ivankov runs prostitution for the Russian mob in
L.A.,” Rush explained.

Hendricks/Ross quickly lost interest.

“We don't do organized crime,” said one.

“Not our wheelhouse,” said the other.

“Franklin Trask makes porn,” Rush went on, trying to engage them. “I think Tarzan was providing the talent pool.”

“Yeah, her brother's a sleaze. So what?”

“A dumb kid richer than God and the Russian Mafiya,” Rush said. “Doesn't that combination strike you as a little…explosive?”

They looked over at the burned-out house. Wiseass.

“All we want is Trask,” said Hendricks.

“He's a different kind of criminal altogether,” said the other one.

Rush shook his head. “Thieves are all alike under the skin. Haven't you learned that yet?”

Zerbe got up early. He shaved. He showered. He even ironed his shirt. He had a very special guest coming. Raul Malo blasted from his iPod speakers.

“Walking down the boulevard, I don't need no lucky charms today!”

The doorbell rang and a vision of loveliness in beige gabardine hove into view. Frida Morales. Zerbe's parole officer.

He offered her a can of soda with, he hoped, all the
cool demeanor of a Matt Helm or a Derek Flint.

“Mountain Dew?” he asked.

“Damn it, Zerbe, I'm not your date.”

“Aren't you? It's funny how fate arranges things,” he said, suavely holding up a container of his urine. “My sample?”

When people asked Zerbe why he got sent to prison, he was usually too embarrassed to say corporate malfeasance. He liked to tell them he was the guy Leonardo DiCaprio played in
Catch Me If You Can
. It just sounded better.

One of the conditions of his parole was that he was allowed no access to computers or the internet. Zerbe believed that rules were meant to be, if not broken, at least strongly negotiated with. So while Frida examined the electronic tether attached to his ankle, all of his computers were safely stowed behind sliding steel walls. A place for everything and everything in its place.

“A little higher,” he said, as Frida explored the burn marks on the device that would keep him tied to these four walls for three more years.

“I'm going to have to send a tech to look at this thing. Was there some sort of power surge?”

“I got hit by a taser.”

She looked at him with raised eyebrows.

“Things happened,” he said.

“You haven't been tampering with this, have you? This is a state-of-the-art GPS. It'll tell me the second you leave this place.”

“It sees me when I'm sleeping. It knows when I'm awake.”

“Don't complain. There's a new model that'll tell me whether you've been drinking. It samples the skin pores on your ankle for traces of alcohol.”

“Thanks. I'll keep the tequila away from my ankle, then.”

“Zerbe, you've been clean for six months,” she said, patiently. “No violations, no drugs, no alcohol. Don't blow it now.”

“That's right, I've been a good boy. Can't you tell them to take this thing off of me? Let me leave here?”

“You're forgetting about the six months before that.”

“So I had a few slips. You could put in a good word for me. They'll listen to you. In return, I'll be happy to satisfy you like no man ever has.”

Frida ignored the last part of his request, but Zerbe liked to think that she filed it away for future reference. “It would be easier if you changed the location of your custody. If you were staying with your family.”

“I don't want to stay with my family. The court approved Caleb Rush as my legal whatsit.”

“I think the court made a mistake.”

“Hold me.”

Zerbe wondered if that might have come off as needy.

When Frida left, he broke out the computers again. It was time for his online AA meeting. In Zerbe's opinion, online AA meetings were much better than real-life
AA meetings, because you could half-pay attention while playing World of Warcraft on another monitor. The only downside was, when he was asked to identify himself in the AA meeting, he had to be careful not to type “I'm Prince Darkside, and I'm an alcoholic.”

He was reading Alcoholic Alan's endless dissertation on whether he missed beer more than wine, while keeping an eye out for the Corrupted Blood Plague, when Rush came in with Amelia, both of them soaking wet. Rush asked for another phone, since his was waterlogged. Zerbe grabbed one off the rack (they kept a lot of spares) and tossed it to him. He started punching in a number while Zerbe asked what happened.

“My house blew up,” Amelia said, like she was reporting a bad case of termites.

“Donleavy,” Rush said into the phone, “we have to talk.”