I understood why it had happened. Serena was as tall as Payaso was, five-nine. She was smart. She used to run with the guys. She wasn’t like the other females, whose anger and opposition he could have blown off as girlish pique. A challenge from Warchild was a challenge. He couldn’t have backed down and not lost face in front of Iceman.
So he hit her. Not a hard slap, just enough to remind her of how things were. In case she’d forgotten. Which I guess she had, because she was staring at him in shock, and he was looking back at her with a cold, impassive expression, not moving out of her way.
I said, in a low voice, “Let’s take a break, okay? This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
They were still staring at each other.
I went to Serena’s side, playing the soothing girlfriend. “Let’s go into town, okay? Everyone needs to cool off, and we didn’t really eat a lot of breakfast. We’ll get something to eat, all right?”
“Yeah,” Serena said, her voice muted. “Okay.”
I looked at Payaso. “Can we take your car?”
forty-five
We’d barely gone two miles, me driving, when Serena leaned forward, head in her hands lowered almost to the dashboard, and started to cry.
“God damn him,” she said, sniffling.
I recognized what a good time this would be not to say anything glibly comforting, and didn’t.
We were silent the rest of the way into town, except for Serena’s brief spasm of tears, which dried quickly. We went to a diner and ordered garlic fries and cream-cheese jalapeños and Cokes and found a table in the back, where we could talk without being overheard. The infusion of sugar and grease seemed to have a calming effect on Serena. She watched through the window as a stellar jay splashed and bathed in a parking-lot puddle. I watched, too, but I was thinking of the problem at hand.
By the time we’d finished our food and were sitting idly sipping our Cokes, I said, “I think you’re right.”
“About what part?” she said dully, sitting with her chin in her hand.
“Skouras has to die,” I said.
She raised her head. I’d surprised her. She wasn’t used to hearing me sound so bloodthirsty, and in so flat a tone.
I explained: “This isn’t going to be over until Skouras’s got the baby or he’s dead. I’d say that it’s okay for him to get the baby-hell, I’d offer to bring the baby to him, except that Nidia will never stop trying to get the kid back. Maybe she’ll go through the courts or even go to the media, but somehow she’ll make an annoyance of herself, and he’ll have her killed. He might have her killed anyway, preventively, and Costa’s warning about ‘if you don’t cooperate’ was bullshit from the start. For all I know, if I arrange a meeting to hand the baby over, he might have his guy say, ‘Thank you very much,’ and put a bullet in my head, just for knowing about the whole thing. And for wasting his time and punking his guys.”
Serena said dully, “You want us to do what Payaso said, have one of my girls dress up as an office cleaner and get close to him?”
I shook my head. “I’m not letting one of your homegirls do this,” I said. “That wouldn’t work very well, either. The problem with an assassination in his home or his office, for one of your sucias, would be getting out safely. But there’s another option. Skouras has to get around, and San Francisco has horrible traffic. That’s why bike messenger services are so successful there. Bikes cut right through the traffic.”
“Are you saying you want to do it? On your bike?” Serena said.
“It’s a variation on a drive-by,” I said. “They do it a lot in foreign countries, on motorcycles. I’d be almost unrecognizable as a bike messenger, dressed like one, wearing a helmet. If I pull my hair down low enough, it’ll obscure a lot of my birthmark. And I could probably even dye my hair dark.” The details were coming to me fast. “I’m wearing a half-open jacket over a shoulder holster with the gun under it. I pull up alongside Skouras’s car, blast away, I’m gone. One of you could be waiting for me somewhere nearby. I cut through an alley or a parking garage, dump the bike and the helmet, get in a car with you, and we’re gone. Skouras’s guys will know who it was afterward, but they already know who I am. No one’s at risk who wasn’t before.”
Of course, it was possible that it wouldn’t work, that Skouras’s guys would kill me, either on the spot or later. That possibility was part of my calculations. I do X, he does Y, I get killed. It was still weird to me that I could think so dispassionately about my own death. I’d learned not to talk about it that way, though, not even in front of someone as jaded as Serena.
“I don’t like it,” she said.
“We’ll refine the details as we go,” I said.
But she was shaking her head, looking out at the hills and the horizon. “This is a detail that can’t be refined away,” she said.
I hesitated, grasping her meaning. “An assassination is unacceptable to you?”
“You doing it is unacceptable to me,” she said. “You’re not a murderer, Insula.”
I pulled my food basket toward me and picked up one of the few remaining french fries, even though I wasn’t hungry. “In a way, I’m avenging my own murder. His guys shot me to death in Mexico, or at least that’s what they thought. They dragged me off the highway so no one would find me. It doesn’t absolve Skouras that I didn’t actually die. He wanted me to.”
“But you didn’t, prima.”
“We haven’t got a world of options here, Serena.” I was frustrated.
We were silent a moment. Then I said, “Look, we’re not going to throw this plan together in twenty-two hours, anyway. When Costa calls back, we’ll stall. I’ll try to work out a deal in which Nidia stays with us until the baby’s born. I’ll tell him we’ll work out a hand-over then.”
“He won’t go for that.”
“He doesn’t know where we are. He’ll have to go for it or stick his thumb up his ass.”
“No, he’s going to stick a gun up your ass when he finds you, that’s what he said on the phone,” Serena said.
“Well, it’s the best plan I can come up with,” I said. “We just need to stall while I go back to San Francisco and do enough surveillance on Skouras to get his routines down. Then I do the hit, and Nidia and her baby are safe.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The baby’s value to Skouras is strictly personal. Once he’s gone, there’s no reason for his soldiers to keep this quest alive. They’re just hired guns. If no one’s paying anymore for the baby to be found, that’ll be the end of the search.”
“Hired or not, the Greek’s guys might take his murder kinda personal,” Serena pointed out.
“They won’t blame Nidia for that.”
“You mean they’ll go after you.”
“I’ll be the one who hit Skouras,” I said. “They’ll know that.”
Serena said, “I’m still in unacceptable-losses territory with this.”
I pried the lid off my drink and stirred the sepia-colored mix of Coke, water, and the remnants of hollow ice-machine cubes. “I don’t know anymore who started this,” I said. “When I drove into that tunnel, I was a civilian noncombatant, and those guys shot me point blank. But then we took the fight back to them when we went after Nidia. We didn’t have to do that. But however you look at it, we’re engaged now. It’s a war. And if someone’s got to die before it’s over, I think it should be Skouras rather than Nidia or one of your homegirls or me. Can we agree on that?”
She nodded.
I crumpled my napkin and threw it into the plastic basket. “Come on, then, let’s head back.”
On the drive back to Julianne’s place, I said, “So what was Trippy saying about me?”