He tried to toughen up and demand to know where they were going but the cop went silent and the pills were taking all the edge out of Rollins anyway. He stared up from the floor, catching glances of buildings and street lights through the windows. In a little over an hour he would have to go to Paradise Isle and the Nip to pick up the van and the girls and drop them off at the party. He hoped to God that whatever the cops wanted it wouldn’t delay him and bring attention.
They finally stopped. The cop killed the engine and opened the back door for Rollins to dig himself out. They were in a dimly lit alley, a van with Bay City Plumbing on the side was parked at one end. Rollins tried to make out the street, get his bearings, but the cop was sliding the door of the van open and hustling him inside.
Dela Cruz was sitting on a spin seat just inside, staring Rollins down and wearing a gray rain coat. There was another cop, some fat son of a bitch, sitting in front of a computer rig in the way back of the van.
“Marvin, we have it on good authority that you’ll be transporting the girls to the party tonight, is that correct?” Dela Cruz said.
“What the hell is this?”
The pills were wearing off, the anxiety coming back, all smashed together in a cramped van.
“Just answer the question Marvin. Are you bringing the girls over to the bar?”
“Yeah, and I got to get over there soon too. I don’t got a lot of time here Detective.”
“How many girls are you supposed to bring?”
Rollins could feel the panic rising in his gut.
“You don’t want me to wear a wire do you? Jesus, I’m not going to hang around there, I’m just making a drop off.”
He felt the other cop get close, the man’s mouth right next to Rollin’s ear.
“You’ll do whatever we tell you Marvin,” the cop said.
Dela Cruz watched him impatiently, flexing her jaw.
“You're not wearing a wire. Just tell me how many girls you're supposed to bring?”
“I don’t know, how many ever will fit in the van I guess. Seven or eight?”
Dela Cruz nodded.
“Good, I’m going to be one of them.”
Rollins thought he misheard and was going to speak but the other cop beat him to it.
“You? You can’t go in there!”
Dela Cruz turned the hard gaze towards her partner, forgetting Rollins for the moment.
“What choice do we have?” she said.
“Is this your fucking plan? How many times have you been undercover? It’s too God damned dangerous.”
“We were told that it’s nothing, the girls just flirt and hang around. Isn’t that right Marvin?”
Rollins was trying to figure out what it all meant. The pills and the fear were slowing him down.
“I don’t know, the girls are just for show I guess. I mean, what the fuck do I know?”
“What if someone makes you?” the other cop asked Dela Cruz coldly.
“Who would do that?
Rollins watched the back and forth between them and then jumped in.
“I hope you're not thinking I’m going to stick around in case something goes down. They’re killers for Christ’s sake,” he said.
Dela Cruz swung her glare back to him, piercing him cold.
“You admit it. They’re killers,” she said.
“That’s what you say. What am I supposed to think?”
The cop shook her head, then stood with a red purse in her hand, sliding the door open.
“Let’s go,” she said.
They left the fat cop with his computer screens and gadgets and made their way out into the alley.
“I swear to God Claudia, if we see anything amiss on the monitor we’re coming in,” the cop said.
“I’m counting on it,” she replied.
Rollins followed them towards the car, eyeing them both, the frustration and the anger all overpowered by the fear.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You're supposed to be a stripper.”
Dela Cruz turned around, unbuttoning the raincoat.
“I’ll put on makeup in the car,” she said.
Under the coat was a blue dress that fit along the cop’s body like a second skin. Rollins took in the low cut of it along her chest and the high cut of it along her legs and was impressed.
“That’ll probably work,” he admitted.
“I’m glad you approve,” she said and continued towards the car, buttoning the coat back up.
****
First Oscar picked up Vaughn’s gun off the wet grass and shoved it in his jacket. He moved methodically, mechanically, pulling the wallet from the man’s pants along with his keys, then he rolled Vaughn’s body over the edge of the cliff. There were bushes about fifty feet down the cliff and for a moment the body was slowed and almost became tangled up with them before ripping free. It slid along the rocks and continued its descent into the ocean below.
Oscar helped the girl up and removed the tape as gently as he could. She was sobbing uncontrollably and he had to keep an arm around her as they went back through the tunnel to the road. He put her in the car and then got in himself. They drove down the hill and back over the bridge and the girl kept sobbing and crying. Oscar didn’t say anything, he watched the City all lit up before them and tried to get his thoughts in order.
He hadn’t been thinking when he shot Vaughn, he had simply done it. He had watched Vaughn raise the gun, that grin on his face, the girl on her knees in front of him, and next thing he knew Oscar was raising his own gun and pulling the trigger.
“He was going to kill me,” the girl said.
He looked over at her. She had stopped crying, just staring into the dash board wide eyed. She was one of the girls from Paradise Isle, the one that used to dance at the Nip.
“Do you have any money?” he said. “You need to get out of town.”
“Out of town?”
The girl continued to stare into the dashboard. Oscar reached over and gripped her chin gently, bringing her face towards him.
“What’s your name?”
“Judy.”
“Someone wants you dead Judy. You understand? You need to get out of town.”
The girl just stared, not understanding.
“Do you have somewhere you can go?” he asked.
She was still staring, scared and stupid. What was he going to do with her? He had acted irrational, not thinking, and now he was starting to worry.
“My mom’s, in Santa Cruz,” the girl finally said.
The drove through the City, the rain coming down steady now. The situation was starting to close in on Oscar and he needed to focus. Get the girl going, get rid of her, that was first.
He drove the car along the water and up Folsom, stopping in front of the Grayhound station. The girl was back into the dashboard, staring again. Oscar reached in his pocket and pulled out cash, a little over eight hundred dollars, it would have to do. He handed it over to the girl.
“Get on the next bus to Santa Cruz and stay there,” he said. “Wait a day and then go to the police.”
“The police?”
She looked at him desperate now, a frightened animal.
“You heard me. Get going.”
The frightened animal blinked at him a few times, the money folded up in her thin white hand. She finally reached around and got out of the car and Oscar watched her walk through the rain slowly, seemingly unaware she was getting drenched. He waited until she had gone through the doors of the station, then he pulled away.
To leave now was just as good as later he supposed. There was the chance they would go after him even harder and he would just have to get even farther away. He would have to leave the country, South America maybe, somewhere in Europe. But he would have to get the money first.
Oscar had planned on leaving even before he had seen the opportunity to steal the two hundred and eighty five thousand dollars from the Gold Duck.
****
Rollins didn’t say a word in the car ride to Cat Nip and neither did Claudia. He parked in a back lot next to the van and then Claudia waited in the van while Rollins went inside. She put on her makeup as she waited. It didn’t look very good, she thought, but it would have to do. Three girls climbed into the van, all perfume and ample cleavage, eyeing her briefly, and then Rollins got back in and they headed towards Paradise Isle where they picked up three more.
The girls were sharing a bottle on the road, laughing and demanding Rollins turn up the radio. One opened a little plastic bullet and sniffed a bit of powder off the end of her fingernail. They passed the bottle back to Claudia who took a swig.
“I haven’t seen you before,” said a redhead sitting in the seat in front of her. “You new at Nip?”
Claudia shook her head.
“I’m down in San Jose. They called me last minute,” she said.
She looked up at the rear view and caught Rollins watching warily. He looked away and lit a cigarette.
They drove through the Mission District, the rain picking up. Rollins pulled the van up along side the door of the bar and then got out to slide open the van door. The girls got out in a rush, cursing the rain. Claudia was the last to get out, and she waited until the others had gone inside before she turned towards Rollins.
“What time do you pick us up?” she asked.
“Whenever someone calls me. Could go until morning.”
He pulled another cigarette from his pack and chain smoked under the building’s awning.
“I want you back here at three AM if you haven’t heard anything,” she said and went through the door.
There were already quite a few people inside, it was crowded and seemed darker than it had been the night before. The first person Claudia spotted was Charlie Henderson, AKA “White Charlie”, lingering near the door with a drink in his hand. He looked at her, his eyes blank and dead, giving her the creeps. She forced herself to smile at him before stepping farther into the bar where there was more light.
She saw McCarthy’s big guy, the black one Cabbagepatch, standing near the front door, eyeing the crowd. She saw one of the Flores brothers, the older one with the mustache, drinking with another man and laughing hysterically. She saw Dick Fagin sitting nearby, taking a long look at the redhead from the van, sucking his teeth. She saw the fat one with the little round cherry cheeks, Murphy, having a shot and stuffing his face at the buffet table they had set up next to the juke box.
And then she saw Leo McCarthy. She had seen him many times before, countless times in photographs and twenty or so odd times when they were doing surveillance on the clubs and paint store. She had always seen him through binoculars or a camera, always from a far. This time he was standing not more than ten feet away, speaking to two men.
He wasn’t a bad looking man, he actually looked friendly, making his companions laugh as he casually sipped his beverage. He looked like a nice uncle or a hip grandfather that showed up for the holidays wearing expensive clothes and a gold watch.
McCarthy seemed to sense Claudia’s eyes on him, he looked over at her. She smiled and he took her in with a grin as well before his focus returned to his guests.
“I don’t think I seen you around sweetheart.”
Claudia turned around and White Charlie was standing close, too close. He stared with those shark eyes and Claudia realized she needed to concentrate on her role.
“You new or something?” he said.
“I’ve been around.”
“Oh yeah? Where?”
Claudia grinned at him.
“They got me over at Paradise right now. Just a few nights a week to start out.”
“Who hired you?”
Both dead eyes stared and Claudia could feel the sweat drip down her neck, making its way between her shoulder blades.
“Is this geezer bothering you?”
McCarthy’s nephew Patrick had crept up and thrown his arm around White Charlie’s neck, pulling the old man off balance. Charlie grimaced and tried to push the nephew away but the younger man held on, forcing them to slide along the floor together. They looked ridiculous to Claudia, like two little boys wrestling, until the old man broke away and retreated towards the buffett, the shark eyes glazed with anger.
“God that guy. Older than shit right?” The nephew seemed very drunk, his right eye wobbly and slightly slower than the left. Claudia held the purse in her hands and concentrated it on him. “How you doing though? You came with the other girls?”
“Yeah, we just got here.”
Claudia tried to soften her tone, act natural.
“That right? Well, Jesus, let me get you a drink then.”
Claudia watched him stumble off and then she slowly shifted at an angle, letting the purse take it all in. Two of the girls were dancing with a man in a suit, the others were at the bar getting drinks bought for them by various men; most dressed in suits with the ties removed. She recognized Larry Schmidt, the head of Schmidt Contracting, and the purse saw him too. She saw Ron Harvey, the lawyer from downtown, and the purse saw him as well. She saw San Francisco supervisor Dale Pernivo talking to Leo McCarthy and she made sure the purse took it all in.
“I figured you were tequila girl,” Pat said and handed the drink over.
Claudia took it and smiled. She felt like she had smiled more in the last ten minutes than she had in the last two years. Pat held his own drink up and shot it back and Claudia did the same.
****
The party in the Mission would have started by now, almost all the guys would be over there, but it would just take a phone call to alert someone. The Gold Duck bar would be busy and upstairs there would be be a few Friday poker games getting under way. Yellow Charlie would be working, they probably had Vlad and one of the Flores brothers down there too, and they were sure to wonder if he showed up. It was too early, he needed some time to make a clean clean break. He didn’t want to get wrapped up in anything or have to leave a guy he liked on his back.
Oscar pulled over on Kearny to think and take a moment. The rain clapped down on the roof of the Cadillac and he thought back to the night he discovered the hollowed out wall in room 22 at Gold Duck. He had gone to take a break and get some sleep, and had been searching the room’s walls for an outlet to plug in his phone. The room had a bed and a dresser and that was about it, it was mostly used for storage and the occasional trick, and when he pulled the little dresser away from the wall he noticed there was a clear cut and a change in the color of the paint on the wall. He scraped the dust away from the cracks with his finger and then pulled the little square of wall with one of his keys, opening it like a door.
There may have been a safe there years before but all Oscar found was a hollow, going four feet back beyond the wall. The building was at least a hundred years old, who knew when or who had dug it out. He was sure no one in the crew knew about it. The building had been vacant for over twenty years, technically it still was. Before that it had been various hotels and rooming houses. It was very possible that there was no one alive that knew about the little cave in the wall.
Oscar hadn’t thought much about about it until word came down that the paint store wasn’t safe for the drop and the money started being kept at the Duck. Pat had told him when they were waiting around for drinks after work and Oscar nodded and stayed cool, like he always did. But his mind was racing.
He had wanted to leave for over a year, after he and Dick killed Martinez. It wasn’t that Martinez hadn’t deserved it, Oscar had wanted to do it, but afterwards he felt nothing and couldn’t seem to shake the numbness or the nightmares. He walked around doing his job and doing it well, feeling nothing except exhaustion. He drank, which helped for short moments, and he had the occasional woman, which helped for even shorter amounts of time. But he could feel himself becoming more numb by the day and knew his life was slowly going to simply fade away and mean nothing, like White Charlie or Dick’s.
The only choice he could see was to get out of the life, and to do that he needed money. On November twentieth, after a few weeks of using the Duck as the drop, he saw his chance. Everyone within the crew knew the combination to Yellow Charlie’s safe so they could make drops, it was simply a matter of waiting until the coast was clear, and then slipping into the office with the duffel bag he had stashed. He had filled it with cash, then crept back up to room 22 and dropped the bag in the hollow behind the dresser. He knew they would try to figure out who made off with it, never guessing it was still there. He hadn’t realized they would bring someone from out of town and that he himself would be marching the Croat out into the woods.
He had figured he would wait until everything had completely died down, slip out the bag on a clear night, wait a few more months, then make a clean break from the crew, no hard feelings. Circumstances being what they were, he no longer had the luxury of waiting. He had to get out that night, to get a jump on things before Vaughn’s people started calling or the body turned up. But he wouldn’t be able to retrieve the money till later, maybe just a few hours, when the whole crew was drunk at the party. He would go to the party himself to stave off suspicion, keep an eye on things until the time was right to make for the Duck. It was the best move, the only move really.
He pulled the car out and went around the block, heading in the direction of the Mission District.
***
As her mind slowed down Judy came out of the trance. She was soaking wet, sitting on the bench at the station, but she didn’t feel the chill. It wasn’t until her nose began to run that she woke up, began to gather what had happened. The man had meant to kill her. She had been waiting for the bullet to come, and as she waited she thought of the child that would never have a chance to see the world. The thought was so dreadful that her mind and body seemed to shut down for a moment, she wasn’t aware that Oscar Rayne had shot the other man until she looked up and he was rolling the body off the edge of the cliff.
What at first had confounded her seemed very obvious as she sat there shivering on the station’s wooden bench; somehow the man had found out about her and the police. He had found out about her meeting with Leo and had set her up to kill her. Leo must have been worried sick, for all she knew he was searching all over the City for her. Thank God for Rayne, if he hadn’t reacted she and the baby would be in sea. The thought made the breath catch in her throat.
She needed to let Leo know what his man had done for her. She wanted him to know she was alright. She needed to talk to him more than anything in the world.
She talked the the woman at the ticket counter into changing her out for a dollar and then went to the payphones lined up at the back of the station, reaching up with a cold tittering hand to drop the coins in the slot. The operator got her number to the bar in the Mission and then a voice she didn’t recognize spoke from the other end.
“Is Leo there?” she asked and her voice shook like a child’s.
“Who’s this?”
“This is an emergency. Let me talk to Leo!”
The man on the line seemed to chuckle: “You fucking kidding me?”
The line went dead for a long moment and then Judy heard a shuffling and a scraping of the phone before Leo said: “Hello, who’s this?”
“Leo, it’s me.”
There was silence for a few seconds. Judy could hear him breathing into the phone.
“Darl’n?”
“Yes. This man, this man tried to kill me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They took me up in the hills. They put me in the trunk Leo.”
“Where are you?”
“They know about me Leo. I’ve got to tell you, they know about me.”
“Where the hell are you?”
She was breaking, the shock having worn her down, the tears flowing again.
“I don’t know how he knew. I should have told you but... they had a sentence hanging over me. I can’t have the baby in jail. Not our baby Leo!”
Leo’s voice dropped, calm and controlled.
“Take it easy darl’n. Just tell me what you're talking about. What’s this about jail now?”
“The police. The man knew about them. He was going to kill me Leo, but Oscar Rayne shot him. I don’t know why, I don’t know anything Leo. I just know I love you. And I want this baby to be free of all of this, I want it-”
“Shut up.”
Judy wiped the tears and snot from her face, trying to focus.
“What?” she said. She was confused, grinding the phone into her ear.
“I said shut up and tell me the hell you're talking about? Oscar shot Vaughn? Is that what you're telling me? Oscar shot him?”
She could feel the rage coming through the phone and tried to understand.
“He was going to shoot me. They took me up in the hills and were going to shoot me.”
“And the police you silly bitch?! You think you can pull that baby shit with me and start babbling about the police and I’m just gonna roll over. You think you can fucking con me? I should have killed you myself, this morning, in my fucking house! You better hide other the dirty fucking rock you crawled out from because-”
Judy dropped the phone and watched it swing from its metal chord. The world melted around her, the cold sunk in, and she was alone. She walked, stiff with fear, back towards the ticket counter, step by step, concentrating to keep her body in motion. For a brief moment she almost wished the man had killed her. Nothing was the way she thought it was, the world was upside down. The man she thought she loved, the father of her child, wanted her dead, he-
She pushed all thoughts and fear away, running on automatic. All that mattered was the baby, that was it.
I’ll be wandering the cliffs and glens of Ireland in September, three weeks of the country on foot, and I’ll be bringing one backpack with me. It will be a large backpack, a Karrimor hiking pack. It’s already broken in, handed down to me by my brother in law Robert, and my goal is to keep it as light as possible while still carrying everything I need for the twenty one days of hiking and travel and still leaving room for mementos that I’m sure I’ll come across and won’t be able to leave the country without. 
