Michael Prescott - Mortal Faults

“Fuck,” he snarled, tossing the gun back inside the safe and slamming the door. He left the books in disorder on the floor. He poured himself another Scotch from the minibar and downed it fast, hoping the burn of alcohol would calm him, but if anything, it made him hotter than before. The situation was insane. He knew her name and address. He ought to be able to stamp her out as casually as he would tread on a cigarette butt. Instead he couldn’t get to her. She was closed off from him, protected by an unbreachable barrier. She might as well be in hiding on another continent. Yet she was so close-

He punched the oak-paneled wall. Pain flashed through his hand. He thought he might have broken it, but no, he could flex his fingers. The raw pulse of pain in his knuckles felt good somehow. Better than the Scotch had tasted. He didn’t need Scotch. He needed pain.

Not his own pain, though. His own pain was never the answer.

He found his car keys and left through a side door, taking his Mustang coupe. He drove fast on the surface streets and reached Rebecca’s condo in Costa Mesa. It was past one o’clock by now, and she was asleep, of course. At the front gate he buzzed her unit until she answered.

“Me,” he said. “Open up.”

She did, but only after she hesitated. He made a mental note of that. She would pay for hesitating.

She met him at her door. He pushed her inside and shut the door behind him.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, seeing his face, and from her expression he knew he must look like a wild man.

He didn’t answer. He pushed her down, and she fell on the floor in a confusion of long limbs and the tissuey folds of her nightgown.

“You bitches,” he said.

She stared up, uncomprehending.

“Dumb fucking bitches, playing your games.” He thought of Andrea. And Abby Sinclair, who’d walked out on him.

“Jack?” Rebecca whispered.

He struck her in the face. Her head snapped sideways and she groaned and there was blood on her mouth, and it was all good.

Abby left the station house and caught the Hollywood Freeway, speeding south into Orange County. The day’s traffic had finally cleared, and the Mazda could go all out. Putting the pedal to the floor relieved some of her tension, but not much.

Along the way, she stopped first at a large discount drugstore, then spent ten minutes in the bathroom of a fast food joint. When she emerged, her hair had been moussed and slipped back, her pageboy ’do transformed into a tight skullcap. Tacky oversized earrings, maroon lipstick, and glue-on fingernail extensions completed her makeover.

She didn’t think the bad guys at Andrea’s house could have seen her. If they had, it couldn’t have been more than a glimpse. She looked sufficiently different to pass unrecognized now.

One thing was for sure. She could change her appearance a lot more easily than the man with the scorpion tattoo could change his.

At eleven thirty she arrived in Santa Ana and cruised down South Grande Avenue until she found Fast Eddie’s.

Wyatt’s info had been correct. The Scorpions did hang out here, or at least some biker club did. Choppers, all of them American-made and none boasting engines smaller than 900 cc’s, were parked out back in the deadpan glare of a mercury-vapor streetlight. The bikes were unguarded, their owners apparently known in the community-known and feared.

Abby didn’t leave her car in the lot. She didn’t want anyone seeing the Mazda and remembering it from Andrea’s neighborhood. Instead she motored down another block and found a space at the curb, then walked briskly to the bar, her purse in hand with the gun inside.

Fast Eddie’s was a clamorous hellhole. Some kind of noxious hip-hop was banging out of the cheap sound system. A woman who was high on more than life gyrated on a pool table while some guys yelled catcalls, and others shouted at her to get off the table so they could play pool.

Those guys weren’t Scorpions, though. The Scorpions were seated together in a corner of the bar, ignoring the bedlam.

She knew them at once, not from the tattoos, which she couldn’t make out at a distance, but from the air of masculine camaraderie that defined any wolf pack.

There were two dozen of them occupying a nest of corner tables. They wore their colors, sleeveless leather jackets with scorpion insignias on the back. A few female hangers-on, ranging in age from jailbait to over-the-hill, petted and fondled and looked bored. The men were loud and drunkenly obnoxious, their blurry stares daring any patron to start something. It was a safe bet that every one of them was packing a gun.

Although Santa Ana was largely Hispanic, the Scorpions were all Anglos. Most gangs formed along racial lines. Probably this one had originated as a way of defending a slice of this miserable turf from the encroachment of immigrants.

Abby went up to the bar and got the attention of the slow-moving, heavy-lidded bartender. He was wiping a glass with a hand towel that looked dirtier than the dishware. On the wall behind him was a sign:

PARKING FOR HARLEYS ONLY-ALL OTHERS WILL BE SHOT.

Fast Eddie’s, it would appear, was not aiming to reproduce the social atmosphere of the Algonquin Roundtable.

“What?” the bartender said. His lower lip was set in a permanent curl.

“Vodka rocks.”

He grunted and poured. She slapped a bill on the counter and told him to keep the change, advice he accepted without gratitude.

Abby wasn’t a believer in drinking on duty, but if she’d ordered anything nonalcoholic, she might have called attention to herself. She sipped the drink. The cheap vodka burned with a sour aftertaste.

Her barstool afforded a good view of the Scorpions’ conclave in the mirror behind the bar. She watched the rowdy crew, her gaze moving from one man to the next, dismissing anyone without a tattoo on his neck.

She spotted him at the second of the three tables. She hadn’t expected to feel anything when she saw him again, and her reaction surprised her. She felt a sudden jolt like a fist in the stomach. Her eyes watered. She brushed them dry with the back of her hand.

For just a moment she was trapped in the bedroom again, taking fire from front and back, with no way out and only five bullets in her gun.

She shook off the memory. She took another sip of vodka, which wasn’t tasting quite so bad now, and studied the man who’d tried to kill her.

He was in his mid-twenties, muscular and hard-eyed, but his face was softer than it should have been, almost feminine in its contours. He reminded her a little of Leon Trotman, who had stalked the schoolteacher in Reseda until Abby put him back in jail.

She had nearly killed Leon. And she hadn’t had anything personal against him.

She watched him listlessly downing a stein. He was flanked by two sidekicks. One of them looked sleepy, and the other one looked restless. His two partners in crime, she guessed.

The man she recognized was paying little attention to his pals. His eyes were downcast and worried. No doubt he was concerned about his future. He’d failed in his assignment. Abby didn’t know the Scorpions’ penalty for failure, but she doubted it was anything to look forward to.

The rest of the gang weren’t shunning him, though. Either they were exceptionally loyal or they didn’t know he’d screwed the pooch. The best guess was they didn’t know about the assignment at all. The whole thing had probably been kept on the q.t.

Abby had spent much of the ride from L.A. reconstructing how the hit was arranged. Reynolds grew up in Santa Ana and had been the D.A. there. At some point, either in his youth or on the job, he came into contact with the Scorpions. Probably he did them some favors as a D.A. In exchange, they would do his dirty work. Every successful leader needed operatives at the grassroots level, and not all the operatives were the fresh-faced variety she’d seen at the campaign office.