CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

"Connect me with Rayburn, please."

She hated to do it, but she had no more choice. Not after what happened with Weasel. Not after what she'd seen in the morning paper, and heard on the radio news.

"Jade, is that you?" His voice was warm and he sounded genuinely pleased to be speaking to her, and Jeanette regretted that she would probably never hear him sound quite that way again.

"It's off," she said.

"Pardon me?"

"The job. It's off. I can't do it."

He paused for several beats. "Jade, if this is because of –"

"It's not because of that," she said. She sighed. "There's been a problem."

"What kind of a problem?"

"I don't have the gun. The police have the gun."

He paused again, then said, "Jade, this isn't anything to joke about."

"Damn it, Rayburn, do you think I would joke about it?"

"Maybe you'd better tell me what's going on."

She was in her car, and leaned her brow against the curve of the steering wheel while holding the phone to her ear. "It's embarrassing. My purse was stolen. My purse with everything in it. The gun, the money, everything."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes, I'm fuckin' serious!" She clapped a hand over her mouth. "Sorry. It's the company I've been keeping lately. A kid swiped my purse right after we had lunch on Friday. I've been trying to find him ever since. I got another kid to look for him, and that kid is in the hospital now. Shot. By, I'm willing to bet, the gun that you gave me."

The news reports had been sketchy, with no names given as of yet. Some of the details didn't add up. A man broke into a Dunley Street apartment in the middle of the night Saturday, sexually assaulted a young woman, then was shot by the woman's neighbor. In the ironic sort of twist that the news loved, the med student sister of the shooter had performed emergency first aid and been able to keep the intruder alive until paramedics arrived. He had been taken to Century Medical and was out of surgery, though still in critical condition.

She relayed all this to Rayburn. "I only wanted him to find Scoot, and I intended to take care of it from there myself. I never told him what was in the purse but even a piece of slime like him would have guessed it had to be important. Maybe he thought that if he could get his hands on it, he could … I don't know, blackmail me or something."

"But instead, he ended up shot."

"I'm not saying it was undeserved. I would have done it myself once I knew where to find Scoot." She raked her fingers through her hair, letting the platinum-blonde strands sift against her cheeks. "The part I don't understand is the sexual assault. The best I can figure –"

"Excuse me for interrupting, Jade," Rayburn said, and her heart sank. Now he sounded cool and clipped. Businesslike. Not at all the same man who'd invited her to consider dinner with him. "Are you certain that it was the same gun?"

"Not one hundred percent, but if it is, we're screwed. The police will figure out who it belongs to, and then our man will know something's up."

"What about the money?"

"I don't know," she said. "Scoot must have it. Along with … along with the folder you gave me, and my tape."

Rayburn swore softly.

"But we don't need to get worked up over nothing," Jeanette said. "These are burnt out pot-head slackers we're dealing with. Even if Scoot listens to the tape and looks at the information, he's not going to put it together. He'll probably see the money and forget everything else."

"We cannot be sure of that. And there is the matter of the money, Jade. You agreed to perform a service for a price. You were paid a quarter of the offered fee up front. Now you're telling me that you aren't going to be able to deliver –"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Rayburn!" she cried, exasperated. "You'll get the money back, if that's all you can think about. I'll cover the loss of the twenty-five grand."

"The Company was getting a tidy commission for arranging this, Jade, and now it's fallen through."

"Fine, I'll cover your lost commission, too! How much? Ten percent? Twenty? State the time and place and I'll deliver it, in cash."

"It isn't only the money," he said. "What about our man? Even if this Scoot person is, as you say, a burnt out pot-head who won't suspect what he has, our man is going to know something's up."

"There isn't anything I can do about that," Jeanette said heavily.

"And if the folder and the tape do wind up in the hands of the police –"

"They won't be able to connect them to us. I didn't have any identification in the purse."

"Thank God for that, at least." His voice went even cooler. "Because if they do find you, Jade, and you give them us …"

"I know how this works, Rayburn," she said, feeling nettled that he even thought that he had to threaten her. "The police won't find me. They might get prints off of my things, but my prints aren't on file."

"What about the tape?"

"It's not like we used our real names. The best they could hope for would be to figure out where we were, track us to the restaurant. But you paid cash, the reservation was under Dufarge thanks to your sense of humor, and they won't have anywhere to go from there."

"Descriptions," he said darkly.

She started to object, then bit her lip. The hostess. Fascinated with Rayburn, undressing him with her eyes. If the police got to her, she would be able to describe him in loving detail. As for a description of Jeanette, it would go one of two ways. Either she had been a complete nonentity to the hostess, who would have seen Rayburn and only Rayburn and dismissed everything else … or the hostess had taken point-by-point careful inventory of Jeanette, jealously comparing, searching for faults, trying to see what a man like Rayburn might want.

"There's no way they'd get that far," she said. "It'd only be background noise of a crowded restaurant. If they want to canvass every single eatery in the city, let them try. They won't know what we look like from our voices alone."

"All right, so maybe they won't find me," he said. "What about you?"

"The same logic applies."

"But these kids saw you. They'll be able to describe you to the police."

Shit! Jeanette clenched the fist that wasn't holding the phone. "What's Scoot going to say? Tell the police that he got the gun from a purse he stole?"

"What about the other one?" pressed Rayburn. "If he spills his whole story to the police, there won't be much you can do."

"If they even believed him."

"Can anyone back him up?"

She thought of Weasel, and the way he had flopped over with a look of surprise only beginning to register on his face. Weasel wouldn't be talking to anyone ever again, unless it was by Ouija board. The only other one who had seen her looking for Bigfoot was the rhyme-talking black kid. Not the most credible witness in the world, and also someone who would want to have as little to do with the cops as was humanly possible.

Or Bigfoot's brain-dead slut of a girlfriend … where was she? She'd said she was at his place, but his room had been empty. And if he'd had a girlfriend there, why call Weasel to come and hide his drugs and porn?

"Not really," she said to Rayburn. "It sounds too crazy. The police will think he's psychotic or stoned. And he won't know that the gun was from my bag."

"I don't like it," Rayburn said. "This is a real mess, Jade."

"Yes," she said, careful to keep her tone even and not give in to sarcasm. "Yes, I know it is."

"What are you going to do?"

There it was. Not "what are we going to do?" but "what are you going to do?" She was on her own. As always. And while she hadn't really expected any offer of help from Rayburn or the people he represented, she was more than a little disappointed all the same. Part of her had hoped that he would stick up for her, maybe join in the search for Scoot and help her get this all back on track.

"At this point," she said, "I can't exactly walk away."

Because even if good old Bigfoot hadn't told the police what he knew, he would as soon as Weasel's body was found. And Weasel's body would be found, soon. Bigfoot's mom – Jeanette's mental image was of a rawboned hillbilly woman with long snarls of rust-red hair, bad teeth, and rolls of fat over a core of tough hardship-born muscle – would find him when she showed up to gather her son's belongings.

On the plus side, Jeanette thought sourly, maybe she'd done them a favor. Odds were, his mom would be so distracted by finding a corpse in the room that she might overlook the naked women on the walls.

Once Weasel was discovered, the police would be even more involved. They'd want to know who shot Weasel while his buddy was in the critical care unit. They'd interrogate him. If the story about the little blonde lady with the shotgun hadn't already been told, it'd be told then.

All that, though, really was secondary. Bigfoot could tell the police anything he liked and it still wouldn't lead them to Jeanette. She could change her hairstyle, change her look, change her habits. Move away and start over, if she had to. It wouldn't be the first time.

But damned if she was going to let these skateboard kids get the better of her. Damned if she was! They had made her look incompetent. Had made her look bad in front of Rayburn, and just at a moment when it seemed like things might be shaping up interesting between them.

Could she still salvage anything from this debacle? Maybe, if she acted fast.

"And if it's too late for salvage," she murmured, "there's always revenge."

"Jade?" asked Rayburn. "I didn't quite catch that."

"I'll take care of it," she said. "I'll get you the money, and if you still want me to deal with our man, I can find some other way to do that, too."

"I'll have to check with a few people first," he said. "This changes everything."

"Tell me about it."

"And … Jade?"

"What?"

"I'm really very sorry this had to happen," he said. His voice was warmer now, and touched with heartfelt regret.

"So am I. This'll be the end, won't it?"

"The end?"

"Of our association."

He hesitated. "My employers aren't usually very big on second chances."

"I thought so," she said. "Have someone call me when you know where I should drop off the money. Goodbye, Rayburn."

She disconnected, and dropped her phone into the passenger seat, and sat there with her head against the steering wheel with her eyes closed.

A light tap at the window made her jump. She whipped her head up and around and stared at her own reflection in duplicate, mirrored in the shiny silver shades of a motorcycle cop.

**