And Now She's Gone(21)

“If you can’t reach me for whatever reason,” Nick said, “call Portia. She’ll get you what you need. And Jen can help. She knows things. Zadie, if you don’t wanna deal with Jen.”

“Got it.”

“I’ll bring you back a pineapple or a snow globe.”

“I can’t have both?” As she hugged him, she closed her eyes and inhaled. He smelled like oranges and clean laundry.

“I told you: the biochemist is expensive. And you all are cutting into my bottom line with free pizza and beer.” His gun brushed against her arm, and he kissed her cheek with lips still cool from the beer.

Once they pulled apart, she said, “You’re gonna come back one of these days married to some random chick with blonde highlights and teeth whiter than all of Maine.”

He faked a shudder.

Gray faked a chuckle.

This conversation had been one big lie. Yes, there was a biochemist. But Nick’s trip was not vacation. He knew how to find people, and he also knew how to hide them.

The biochemist was going away.

But Gray didn’t know that, officially. She didn’t dare ask. None of this was in the books she’d read or the courses she’d taken. She’d seen other women go away. Hell, she’d researched new places for these women to start a new life.

And if she could prove it was necessary, Nick would help Isabel Lincoln start a new life, too.





HE HAD TO STOP HER





12


Gray made her way to Sam Jose’s, just a mile west, heading away from that copper sun drifting down to the horizon. “I’m a P.I.,” she said, smiling at her reflection in the rearview mirror. She was now a helper. No longer a runner, not anymore.

Tonight, Jennifer drove a metallic-turquoise BMW—it was the brightest, slickest car in the Sam Jose’s parking lot. Her third husband, Reynaldo, owned a car rental business near the airport, and Jennifer often drove the exotics as advertising. With that paint job and tricked-out engine, the car cost more than $100,000, but any Joe with a decent credit rating could rent it for $699. The red banner plastered to the passenger window screamed, “ASK ME!”

Gray didn’t spot Zadie’s battered Subaru or Clarissa’s tiny Fiat—they’d probably carpooled for the short drive from the office.

Sam Jose’s doubled as the archive for all Mexican kitsch in Los Angeles, the “starting over again” place if an asteroid struck Olvera Street. Gray couldn’t see her three coworkers past the glares of neon beer signs, multicolored Christmas lights, or dangling maracas. Dia de los Muertos this, Lucha libre that, sombreros and pi?atas in every empty space.

Hank Wexler was shaking a martini at the bar.

Aware that she was sweaty, stained, and wrinkled, Gray hunched to make herself smaller as she slunk across the cantina’s tiled floor.

Hank saw her and paused midshake, ruining what would have been a pretty swell cocktail.

Gray tossed him a bashful wave and mouthed, Hey.

Hank tossed her a smile and a “Hey.”

“We’re over here!” Jennifer’s words were slurred—blame the tall glass of Long Island Iced Tea in her hand. “You look like you rode a goat here or something.”

“I did. Billy says, ‘Yo.’” Gray slid into the booth beside Zadie and studied the fallen margarita waiting on her place setting. “It’s damn near melted.”

“Next time,” Zadie growled, “get here quicker.”

Clarissa tugged at her pink-streaked ponytail. “Dude, I’ll drink it if you, like, don’t want it. I’m not driving—Irving’s picking me up.” The Chinese American millennial reached for the margarita, but Gray slapped at her hand.

Irving Hwang and Clarissa planned to marry in mid-August. Despite their digging, Clarissa and Jennifer couldn’t find one obviously malicious thing about the skinny Taiwanese accountant who now worked in the United States on a visa and loved everything American, including blondes, burgers, and, oh yeah, Clarissa.

“Hank over there says our first round is on the house.” Zadie drained her gin fizz, then added, “That man’s got it bad for you.”

“Just like my bae has it bad for me,” Clarissa chirped.

Jennifer rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. I’ve met Irving—he is not a ‘bae.’” She pointed at Gray. “Don’t you have another outfit?”

Gray said, “I didn’t have time to change.”

Jennifer pounded the table. “Make time. You wanna look your sexiest, right? And I saw how you tried to sneak in, hoping he didn’t see you. So. Next time. Some wipes. Something black, something flattering. More effort, Grayson.”

Gray had nothing except, “You’re a boozy fount of drunken wisdom, Jen.”

“Glad you finally recognize that.” Jennifer sucked down more of her cocktail. “I ordered you a salad. No tacos.”

“What?”

“No gassy foods, remember?” Clarissa said. “You’re literally still recovering.”

“Remember how you thought you were dying,” Jennifer said, “and you collapsed in the bathroom and I came in and found you and it’s all because you ate that burrito?”

Gray remembered that delicious burrito she’d eaten two weeks after her appendectomy, and, more than that, she remembered the incapacitating pain that came afterward. She’d gone to a clinic—they said it was just gas. Worse, that same clinic had a data breach days later and thousands of patient names and credit card data had been stolen. That delicious burrito hadn’t been worth the trouble.