She lowers both front windows and slides from the Wrangler, drawing the Winchester along with her. Nudges the door shut with her hip.
“Stay,” she whispers. “Stay.”
With her eyes on Skinny, she ducks and backpedals between an SUV and an enormous white Sprinter. Her heart pounds and her hands shiver on Thunder, but she’s got a good view of the driver’s side of her vehicle, and of Felix sitting in the passenger seat, and of the man still coming across the lot toward them.
He stops ten feet short of the driver’s-side window, his back to Bettina. She sees the gun jammed into his waistband, the grip outside his short leather jacket.
“Hello, Joe,” he says.
She can see Felix, staring at the skinny gunman.
Bettina steps from her lair and into the yellow security lights of the parking lot, racking the 12-gauge.
Skinny flinches.
“If you go for that gun, I’ll blow you in half,” she says. The pounding in her ears is so loud she knows he must hear it. So she says it again, louder.
The man raises his hands. “I don’t have a gun.”
“It’s under your jacket.”
“Are you Bettina Blazak?”
“I am her. Turn to me but keep your hands up!”
A lined face and a drooping mustache. His eyes are yellow gold and his face betrays no emotion. A face made in prison, she thinks.
“I saw what you did to Dan.”
“He deserved his punishment.”
“Who ordered it?”
“The Jalisco New Generation Cartel.”
She spreads her feet and clamps the 12-gauge tighter to her shoulder.
“Why?”
“He worked for them and betrayed them.”
“Worked?”
“An arrangement.”
Through the roaring in her ears, she hears Strickland’s words that day in Alta Laguna Park: I’ll do anything to protect you and Joe.
“Are you here to kill my dog too?”
“Yes. The order comes from Carlos Palma himself. His word is the law.”
“I won’t let you. I’ll shoot you before you do that. I can get the cops here in less than a minute. They’re all over the Gaslamp and my phone is in my pocket.”
Listening to her own brittle, adrenaline-charged voice, Bettina believes almost nothing she has just said.
“But you don’t want me dead or in prison,” says Skinny. “If I don’t convince Palma that Joe is dead, he’ll send others to finish the job. And if they fail, he will send more. There’s no end to men with guns, Ms. Blazak. Joe will certainly die. I can’t save him if I’m in prison. Or a grave.”
Skinny’s logic is as dark as it is true.
“How do you convince your boss?”
“I am his son-in-law. And I am not only a fine sicario, I run the New Generation’s business with La Eme — the Mexican Mafia.”
“Why should I believe you’ll lie for Felix?”
“Not just for your dog, Ms. Blazak — I would be lying for me and you.”
“Why?”
“To keep my life and my freedom. My wife and children. My Javier is a soccer star and only twelve. I would be happy to let Joe live. He is cute. You rescued him and I like your videos. And to be honest, you have to let me go or the dog will be hunted down. I always liked him. Isn’t that right, Joe?”
Bettina lowers the shotgun from Skinny’s face to his chest. Past his shoulder she sees Felix, his funny ears alert, his expression intensely focused on the man just a few feet beyond her open window, so easily jumpable. She knows that the Fass! command will launch him like a rocket. Felix could take Skinny by the neck, all fang and jaw, like a hound from the underworld. But Skinny might just be fast enough to draw his gun and fire.
“You killed a man who loved and protected me. I will not let you go.”
“You have to. My freedom for Joe’s life. I can’t bring — I’m sorry you lost a boyfriend. But maybe you’re better off without a violent criminal in your life. Go find someone better.”
Bettina’s cold body has warmed; her trembling fingers and leaden legs feel strong and ready. No roaring in her ears now, just the steady rhythm of blood. Spark to flame to fire.
She will do what needs to be done.
“What’s your name?”
“Frank.”
“Drop the gun, Frank.”
He sets it quietly on the asphalt.
“Now both hands up, Frank. Walk away slowly and Felix won’t attack you. I’m tracking you with my gun until you’re out of sight. Don’t test me. I’ve hit a million clay targets a lot smaller than your head.”
“I’ll never get out of here with all these cops. My car’s way down on Sixth. Give me a ride to Barrio Logan.”
Bettina stands in the fire, the stubborn conviction that she’s about to triumph. Feels capable and fated. She’s clear on what she has to do.
“Kick the gun to me.”
He does. Bettina keeps Thunder pointed at Skinny’s chest as she picks up his pistol by the barrel end and drops it into her suit coat pocket.
“You drive and I’ll keep your gun aimed at your kneecap,” she says. “I’ll take it home to match the cartridges you used on Dan tonight. Should that be required in court. Which it will be, if any more killers like you show up for my dog.”
“You got some brains, niña. We could use you.”
“Stay away from me at all costs.”
As Bettina wends her way from Barrio Logan to Highway 163, Felix sits next to her, bolt upright, nose to the window crack, whining.
Where is Dan?
Who was that bad man?
Why does Bettina smell like bloody meat?
Where is Dan?
The sound of gunfire on the Gaslamp streets has brought him back to Furniture Calderón and the hot, thudding pain in his leg. He curls into the seat and starts licking the scar.
Thinks of Dan in warehouse, still doesn’t understand why Dan left him there under that car.
Thinks of the boy holding him tight and how his leg hurt and the blood tasted, like Bettina’s hand, and how the Good Man shaved part of his fur and stuck something in his leg.
Remembered the cold stone Crate that was his, and all the smells of Tijuana flooding through him as he lay there day after day. Sad, and wanting Teddy and Dan, even Aaron.
He stops licking and looks up at Bettina, who looks at him with an expression so sad that Felix looks away.
But he knows she will not leave him.
Would never leave him.
Team.
47
In answer to the resounding silence of the Strickland clan, Bettina makes the death and disposition arrangements with the county. Charley Gibbon helps, dealing with the detectives and deflecting reporters from her. Besides a local self-defense academy owner, five known gangsters have been killed and two innocent bystanders wounded in the popular Gaslamp Quarter. The media is hungry for information on the dead self-defense instructor, a decorated combat veteran with no criminal record. But they haven’t connected Bettina to Strickland or that night. She drifts around them like smoke.
It costs her a modest fortune to have Dan buried in a hillside cemetery up in Newport Beach, but she wants him close. Strickland’s father and mother actually attend the service. At first they mistake Bettina for a mortuary representative, offering compliments on their son’s appearance. They’re two of the iciest and most charmless plutocrats Bettina has ever met, and she understands a little more of why Strickland was the way he was. Allison Strickland doesn’t show but sends flowers. There are close to sixty people who file through the viewing, mostly clients and former clients of Apex, Bettina gathers. No extended family or close friends. She introduces herself to a series of attractive, mostly unaccompanied women, with an ache in her heart and a towering sense of gullibility.