thirty-eight
“We should’ve got a car from Chato instead,” Serena said for the third time.
The four of us were at a pizza restaurant. Payaso, who had taken instantly and seriously to his role as Nidia’s guardian, was at the salad bar with her, watching her select fresh vegetables and cottage cheese and pineapple chunks. Serena and I were at a table. I had just washed down a pair of Advil with Mountain Dew for my aching finger. It should have been healed by now, except that I’d reinjured it in the fight with Serena’s girls, my jumping-in. And now the scuffle with Skouras’s guy had aggravated it. At this rate, it’d never be healed up.
Serena’s face was dark, and I knew what she was going to say next.
“You spent nearly six thousand dollars on that SUV and now it’s gone,” she said. “You had it for what, a week and a half? What a waste.”
I agreed with her. I’d already said that I agreed with her. The Bronco was in a picturesque abandoned barn where no one would find it for months. Maybe years. Because unless the highway patrolman we traumatized hadn’t followed procedure, he’d radioed in the make, model, and license of our car before he’d gotten out and approached me. Given that a routine speeding stop had turned into an armed attack on a law-enforcement officer, the Bronco was now hot as hell, and I’d had to abandon it.
Now we were all riding in the GTO, which was safe. I doubted the highway patrolman even remembered the color of that car. In moments of trauma-like a speeding car bearing down on you-the mental videographer usually doesn’t capture many details.
Serena said, “If you’d had a stolen car, you wouldn’t be out any money when you had to dump it.”
I said, “I know. But I’ve been driving all over the damn state for ten days. If I’d had a stolen car all that time, some enterprising meter maid would have run the plate by now, and I’d be arrested, and then the mission would never have happened.”
She said, “Maybe you could have driven around and done the research and the reconnaissance in the SUV, but then taken a stolen ride to get Nidia.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said.
So this was leadership, being the goat when things went wrong, even small things. It wasn’t like our mission had failed, overall. But Serena was wound up, frustrated over what hadn’t gone well.
I said, “We’re hitting over five hundred, you know. We have Nidia.”
“Mmm,” she said, a noncommittal sound.
“What?”
She looked across the tables, toward Nidia and Payaso. “You’ve got a choice here,” she said. “You wanted to rescue her and now she’s rescued. Are you sure you want to keep babysitting her?”
I sipped a little of my Mountain Dew. “Yeah, I do,” I said. “Skouras isn’t going to say, ‘Win some, lose some,’ about this. She can’t handle this herself.” Then I said, “If you’re not in-”
“I’m not saying that,” Serena said quickly. “I’m sorry, prima, I’m just nervous. It’s just that we’re out in the middle of nowhere, the old man and his crew are gonna be looking for us all over, and Jesus, I left Trippy in charge back at home.” She frowned. “We probably weren’t even around the corner in the car before she rounded everyone up and started a war with Tenth Street. She hates their asses.”
I nodded in sympathy, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I looked over to where Nidia was, still slowly choosing from the salad bar.
In the shady confines of the old barn where we’d hidden the Bronco, Serena and I had done a short debriefing with Nidia. We’d sent Payaso away, outside, so she could speak freely, and then Serena had begun firing questions at her, in rapid Spanish: Are you okay? Did they hurt you? Touch you? Did they mess with your head?
Nidia had shaken her head, saying no, no. Serena hadn’t seemed to believe her. Are you sure? she’d demanded.
Serena, I’d cut in, stop tripping. They were under orders from Skouras. They wouldn’t have done things like that.
I’d been worried that she was going to get Nidia upset, as Payaso nearly had earlier, in the car, with his rant against the American law. I’d also been surprised at Serena’s depth of concern for the girl she’d dismissed as a “little vic” earlier. But some things were women’s concerns; they transcended petty differences.
When I’d gotten Serena to shut up, Nidia had told us the story. Most of it confirmed what we’d already guessed. The baby she was carrying was Adrian Skouras’s, and Tony Skouras knew about it and wanted the child. Nidia’s family, likewise, had known. They had thought that a tiny village in Mexico, if Nidia disappeared quickly and completely, would be a remote enough place to hide from him. I’d been right about all that.
I’d been wrong about how Tony Skouras had learned about his grandchild. Adrian had not revealed it to his father on his deathbed. Instead, when Nidia had missed her period, she’d asked the help of his home-care nurse with arranging a pregnancy test. The nurse had known even before Adrian had. After Adrian’s death, she apparently told the old man about the joyous life-in-the-midst-of-death fact of Nidia’s pregnancy.
Just days before his death, Adrian had warned Nidia that his father would want the child and would use any means necessary to get sole control of it. Nidia had kept her pregnancy a secret for that reason, never guessing that the nurse would use the information to her advantage.
“That fucking bitch,” Serena had said, as if personally affronted.
After Adrian’s death, Skouras Sr. and his lawyer came to the house with a rich financial offer for Nidia to give up the child, and Nidia had realized that if she didn’t take the carrot, she’d get the stick. She didn’t want money. She wanted her child to be safe from its grandfather. She’d pretended to feel ill and fled out the back door of Adrian’s house.
She’d stayed with her family only a few days. They had known Skouras would be looking for them. As I’d thought earlier, their very anonymity had protected them. If they’d been a middle-class suburban family, he could have found them in the phone book. But her family had wisely fled to another part of the state, while Nidia went to stay with an old friend of her mother’s in Oakland.
Nidia also told us that after she’d been taken from the tunnel, Skouras’s men had driven her to a rented house where a doctor had checked her out for signs of shock after the traumatic events of the day. Then they’d taken her to the airport and brought her back to California by private plane.
Nidia had been under guard in Gualala ever since, treated courteously, fed a healthy diet with plenty of prenatal vitamins, and checked out regularly by a doctor whom the big man-I assumed she meant Babyface-brought up to the house. I’d wondered if the doctor had been the passenger in the Mercedes today.
Payaso and Nidia came back to the table, and in a few minutes, a waiter came out with a pizza that Payaso, Serena, and I would share, and a chicken sandwich for Nidia.
Nidia was quiet, but then, she’d always been quiet. I believed her, though, that Skouras’s men hadn’t mistreated her. That lined up with what I’d told Serena: They wouldn’t have physically or sexually abused the mother-to-be of Mr. Skouras’s grandchild. I didn’t know what psychic scars Nidia was carrying, but she was functioning, and that was going to have to be enough. I’d learned to do a lot of things the hard way in the past few months, but I wasn’t going to learn to be a therapist.
“It’s a good thing we didn’t bring Deacon,” Payaso said, pulling a slice of pizza free of the pie. “My car would be way too crowded.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of driving ahead of us.”
“Back to L.A.?” Serena said.