Lola on Fire Read online

  Her final move, and crowning achievement, was to deface Josephine Neal’s grave. And Lord, how Trapper loved his momma! The Warlords’ top dog visited Cedar Hill Cemetery three times a week and set a bouquet of lavenders—Momma’s favorite—at the base of her stone, and he’d tell her that, by Christ, he missed her so, and that he was half the man without her (hard to imagine, considering he was pushing four hundred pounds). Sometimes he’d sing Jimmy C. Newman songs to her as the stone angels looked down. One night, Blair, now fourteen years old, left her trailer and walked the two and a half miles to Cedar Hill. She clambered over the wall, found Josephine Neal’s grave, and went to work.

  The cemetery caretaker cleaned up most of the mess, but he couldn’t attach the heads back on the angels, and he was still scrubbing the word puta off the stone when Trapper showed up.

  And so began the bloodshed.

  Casper Morales—Lupe’s primary link to La Eme at Orleans Parish—was gunned down while gassing up his Grand Marquis at the Fuel King on Delray Avenue.

  Little Rocky Carson—Trapper’s second cousin on his daddy’s side—was knifed to death in the entranceway of his apartment building. A six-year-old kid found the body.

  Héctor Alonso—meth dealer and failed human being—had his throat cut on the 270 bus between Alligator Creek and the Grove. No witnesses.

  Not that witnesses were necessary. The whole town knew what was going down. Drunk off his ass at Rooster Wilson’s, even Swan Grove’s chief of police was heard to remark, “Those goddamn assholes are going to wipe each other out, and I for one say let them get on with it.”

  The chief of police was a lazy slob who rarely did anything of note, but he was right on the money on this occasion. On October 5, 2008, fourteen months after Blair planted her first seed, five large sedans with blacked-out windows rumbled onto Strawberry Avenue. What followed could have been ripped from a Wild West movie, with store owners slamming their doors and rolling down their shutters, and parents dragging their kids in off the street. The Warlords opened fire first. Otto Dickinson had snuck onto the roof of Trapper’s Gym with a Hi-Point carbine, and he ripped a .45 through Cristóbal Ayala’s chest. A single, startling shot—crack!—and Cristóbal was dead before the echo faded.

  The air filled, then, with the cacophony of gunfire, of dying men’s screams, of the shattering of things. Blair heard the shots from her trailer two miles west. Her momma, roused from some meth-induced stupor, stepped from her bedroom and cocked her ear at the noise.

  “What is that?”

  “The sound of your debts being paid,” Blair replied.

  Once the bodies had been zipped into bags and the dust had settled, Blair tried to persuade her momma to sell the trailer and get the hell out of the Grove. “Let’s go where nobody knows us. We can start again.” But Momma’s rut went deeper than her debt to the Black Lizard Boys. She found a new meth dealer in New Orleans and went right back to where she was before.

  She was dead inside of two years, but Blair had already made plans of her own. She’d gone back to pickpocketing tourists on Bourbon Street and had saved enough coin for a bus to Philadelphia and a dirty room in the basement of an ex-boxer’s house. Before long, she was back in the ring, fighting guys thirty pounds heavier than her in illegal bouts. She had nine fights and won four of them, using her smarts to wear her opponents down before blazing leather into their faces. Her longest fight went twenty-two rounds.

  Jimmy discovered her after one of her losses. She’d taken a right hook from a lightning-fast welterweight that dropped her cold. She came to in the locker room with Jimmy’s scarred face leering down at her.

  “You were doing good,” he said, “until he knocked you out.”

  “Shit happens.” She touched the deep cut beneath her left eye. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “A man who recognizes your talent. I’d like to train you to be a real fighter.”

  “I am a real fighter.”

  “I’m not talking about boxing . . . or whatever this is.”

  Blair didn’t exactly jump at Jimmy’s offer. She wanted to find out more about him first, which wasn’t difficult, given his reputation. Two months later, he showed up at another fight (another loss). He offered her a job—his personal assistant, he said—and a room at his house in Carver City.

  “Why me?” she asked. “I’m nothing special.”

  “I think you are,” Jimmy said. “And I’m usually right about these things.”

  Two days later, she was in the back of a limo on her way to Carver City, her single bag of possessions on the seat beside her. Jimmy met her at the front door of his showy, modern residence, then led her to his office. It was large and clean, with an open fireplace and a cello in the corner that looked as if it had never been played. A forty-something male with muscles packed into a black T-shirt stood by the window. Jimmy nodded at him, then took a gun from the top drawer of his desk and placed it in Blair’s hand.

  “You know what that is?” he asked.

  “A gun,” Blair said. “A pistol.”

  “It’s a Beretta M9. Italian, semiautomatic. This means the gun will reload itself, but pulling the trigger will only fire one bullet at a time. It’s a fifteen-round mag, though, so you can do a lot of damage before you have to stop pulling the trigger. How does it feel?”

  “Heavy.”

  “Won’t feel that way for long. Howie is going to show you how to use it.” Jimmy gestured toward the man with the muscles. “By the time he’s finished with you, you’ll be hitting targets from twenty yards with a blindfold on.”

  Blair looked from Jimmy to the pistol, turning it over in her hand, getting a feel for its weight. “You said I was going to be your personal assistant.”

  “And you are. I just didn’t tell you what you’ll be assisting me with.” Jimmy smiled and clapped her on the shoulder. “Welcome to your first day on the job.”

  Howie was ex–Special Forces. He’d spent eleven years in the Middle East working counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations, and another eight years training snipers at Fort Benning. As well as firearms, he was proficient in knife and weapons combat. It took time, but he taught Blair everything he knew. By the age of eighteen, she could field-strip an AR-15 in under thirty seconds and hit a moving target from sound alone. Jimmy was pleased with her progress, but it was not enough. He financed her intensive schooling in kendo, kung fu, and Krav Maga. I’d like to train you to be a real fighter, he’d said when they first met, but what he actually wanted was a killing machine.

  And Blair knew why; Jimmy had told her all about Lola Bear, in painful and intimate detail.

  “You were in awe of her,” Blair said. She looked at Jimmy, seeing Lola in every scar, in the black torment of his expression. “Maybe you even loved her.”

  “No maybe about it.”

  “Is that what this is about? My training?” They were in Jimmy’s orchard, Blair throwing knives at a series of targets she’d set up between the trees. “Are you trying to create a new Lola Bear?”

  “No.” Jimmy shook his head vehemently. “You’re going to be better than her. Stronger than her. And you’re going to help me bring her down.”

  “So this is a fight-fire-with-fire situation?”

  “Exactly.” Jimmy’s chest swelled and his eyes glimmered in the hazy afternoon light. “Think you can handle that?”

  Blair plucked a knife from her belt, threw it without looking, and struck a man-shaped target in the throat.

  “I can handle anything,” she said.

  * * *

  Blair had pointed out the obvious (although she couldn’t be sure Jimmy had considered it): Brody and Molly Ellis were too valuable a bridge to burn. “We need to compromise them in some way,” she’d said. “Make them do the work for us.”

  “Go on.” Jimmy puffed his fat cigar.

  “They need to feel threatened, scared, but with room to move—to think. If we play it right, they’ll draw on contacts they wouldn’t or
dinarily consider. And maybe, just maybe, one of those contacts will lead them to Lola Bear.”

  Jimmy pushed his tongue to the inside of his cheek again, smoke leaking from the edges of his mouth. Then he shook his head. “No. Too much can go wrong.”

  “I think it’ll work.”

  “Maybe.” Jimmy shrugged. “But if they have information—contacts, addresses, phone numbers—it’ll be quicker to beat it out of them. Shit, I’ll take a tire iron to the cripple’s leg, and you’ll see how quickly the brother squawks.”

  “Brains, Jimmy, not brawn.” Blair placed her fists on the desk and leaned toward him. “No one can think clearly while getting the shit kicked out of them, or while watching someone they love get hurt. It’s not as effective as you like to believe. And twenty years of chasing Lola Bear, torturing her contacts, still not finding her, proves that.”

  Jimmy made a rumbling sound in his chest. Ash fell from the tip of his cigar and powdered his white shirt.

  “Also,” Blair continued, “they may not have those contacts yet. They may need to think laterally, ask around. It might require some footwork.”

  Jimmy considered this for a moment, then his eyes widened and he snapped his fingers. “Well, shit, I can think laterally, too. Let’s kidnap the sister. We’ll put her on camera and send the video file to the kid.”

  “By email?”

  “Shit, no. We’ll put it on a flash drive and mail it anonymously. And we won’t incriminate ourselves in the video. It’ll just be the girl talking to the camera. She’ll need to be beaten up a little—or a lot—but still able to deliver the message: Find Lola Bear, dear brother of mine, or these very bad men will do very bad things.”

  “Okay.” Blair nodded. “That’s better, Jimmy. Smarter.”

  “You like that?”

  “I do, and I’d say go for it, except . . .”

  “Except?”

  “The sister is the brains of the operation.” Blair stood up straight and folded her muscular arms. It was often necessary to adopt such unwavering body language when dealing with Jimmy. “I don’t think Brody can find Lola without her. Also, he might go to the police.”

  “Let him,” Jimmy snorted. “They won’t be able to link the video to us.”

  “You’re missing the point.” Blair said patiently. “For as long as Brody is relying on the police to find his sister, we can’t rely on him to find Lola.”

  Jimmy took a long pull on his cigar. The tip bloomed and sizzled. “Okay, so we threaten to kill his sister if he goes to the cops. Problem solved.”

  “I don’t think so. Brody will be too rattled. He’ll still think he’s got a better chance with the police.” Blair relaxed her posture, but wrinkled her brow contemplatively. “I’d prefer to remove law enforcement from the equation. Then it’s just him and us.”

  Jimmy made that rumbling sound again.

  “I’ll find a way to set Brody up,” Blair insisted, and a word popped into her mind. She wasn’t sure it was the correct word, but it had a wonderful, sinister ring. “Artifice. It’s what I do best. Then we just sit back and wait.”

  “I’m not convinced.”

  “Give me this, Jimmy. Six months, that’s all I ask. And if I can’t deliver Lola Bear, then we kidnap the cripple. You can beat the shit out of her, put a bullet in her eye. Whatever you want.”

  Jimmy exhaled smoke and grinned.

  “Six months,” Blair said. “Then we do it your way.”

  * * *

  Blair found out everything she could about Brody: where he’d lived, gone to school, his interests, favorite movies and music, his employment history, his friends and exes. Then she started watching him, day and night, assuming various disguises to avoid suspicion. She soon devised a scheme to enter his life, seduce him, then persuade him to steal her “stepmother’s” diamonds and frame him for her murder. Jesus, didn’t one of Jimmy’s loaded poker buddies own a house in Freewood Valley? What a serendipitous fucking opportunity! They could use it to stage the crime, and Jimmy’s accountant, Cynthia Gray, could play the part of the wicked stepmom. All she had to do was play dead for a few minutes. She even had one of those fucking hideous Warhol-style paintings of herself that they could hang on the wall for added effect.

  Was it a shitfuck crazy plan? Well goddamn, yes it was. It was. But the craziest plans netted the biggest rewards, and framing Brody would keep him from going to the police.

  “His old man is dead,” Blair had said to Jimmy, having outlined her extravagant scheme. “We eliminated that source of support. The few friends he has are airheads and stoners—fucking useless, all of them. He has no immediate family, other than his sister. His landlord doesn’t give a shit—”

  “The kid has no one,” Jimmy cut in.

  “Right. At least not on the surface,” Blair said. “But with his back against the wall, he’s going to start digging.”

  Blair was about to make her move when a new development inspired a change of plan: Brody had started reconnoitering convenience stores in the early hours of the morning. With no job and barely a penny to his name (hacking his credit information and bank activity had confirmed this), it was obvious that he was going to rob one of them—probably Buddy’s on Independence Avenue, which he’d cased three times.

  Blair waited in the wings, recognizing how to use this development to her advantage, and relishing the opportunity to apply her pickpocketing skills once again.

  “You’re making this too easy, Brody.”

  After all, why fuck him when she could blackmail him?

  * * *

  Celeste had packed up and gone, leaving only a musk of sandalwood and jojoba. Jimmy sloped awkwardly across his chaise longue. The massage hadn’t relaxed him at all.

  “Alexa,” he groaned. “Play Vivaldi.”

  Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons floated from the Echo. Jimmy shifted stiffly, eyes closed. Blair stepped toward him and loomed until he cracked his eyelids and acknowledged her.

  “I like how this is working out,” she said, and displayed the same smile she’d used on Brody: coquettish, with a hint of devilry. Men, she’d learned, were a sucker for that smile.

  “Good for you, but your six months is up at the end of October. That’s . . .” Jimmy counted on his fingers. “Twenty-six days, then I’m pulling the plug on this goddamn cat-and-mouse and doing it my way.”

  “Chainsaw Jimmy. Always looking for blood.”

  “I prefer to be called the Italian Cat.” Jimmy showed his teeth. “Nobody fucks with me. Even dogs run away.”

  Vivaldi stirred the room like a breeze. Dead leaves spiraled beyond the windows. Blair stooped, still smiling, and hooked a lock of silver hair behind Jimmy’s ear.

  “Bitch ruined me,” he snarled. “All these years of searching, waiting for my moment—my revenge.”

  “You’ll have it. Soon.”

  “I wish I had your confidence.” Jimmy’s fists trembled at his sides. “Goddamn it, Blair, this kid had better come through.”

  Blair dropped to one knee and leaned close to Jimmy. Her lips whispered against his cheek.

  “Trust me,” she said, and there was devilry in her voice, too. “A scared little boy will always find his mommy.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Faster, Brody. Go . . . go!”

  Brody ripped through a four-way stop without slowing. A dusty old Buick puttered in front of him and he swerved right—drove fifteen yards with two wheels on the sidewalk, then swerved again to avoid a telephone booth. Molly took a sharp breath, her body pressed into the passenger seat.

  “This is all a dream,” she hissed. “A bad fucking dream.”

  Brody’s eyes flicked to the mirror. The mobsters had fallen back. They negotiated the four-way stop more cautiously, then gunned it once they were through.

  “I’ll get us out of this,” he said.

  Another intersection loomed ahead. There was roadwork on the other side, traffic packed into a single lane. Brody touched the brake and tu
rned left, timing his move to cut in front of a tractor-trailer. It howled at him, leaving rubber on the blacktop. Brody eased off the gas so that the truck flooded his rearview, then made an abrupt right turn, hoping the long trailer masked the maneuver. He jammed his foot to the floor again, blew a red light, then turned into the parking lot of a furniture store. Another glance in the mirror. No sign of Jimmy’s guys. He zipped between rows of parked vehicles, then around the back of the store where the loading docks were. Brody considered tucking his car into one of the docks beside an empty trailer—hoping Leo and company wouldn’t think to look back here—but noticed an access road leading across a patch of scrub, framed with chain-link. He took it at speed, came out on a quiet road that veered north out of town. Several tense glances into the mirrors showed nobody in pursuit. Brody took a series of arbitrary right and left turns before pulling into the gap behind an empty cattle shed.

  “We lost them,” he gasped. “Holy shit.”

  Molly said nothing. She had her face buried in her hands, crying and trembling copiously. Brody cranked the window, took a deep breath. The air smelled of cow shit but it was still fresher than the stifling stench of fear inside the car.

  His nostrils flared. He gripped the wheel to steady the earthquakes in his hands. Lost them, he thought, but something about that didn’t seem right. He, Brody Ellis, had outmaneuvered Jimmy’s goons in his crapped-out Pontiac. Even back at the motel, he’d outwitted them. It shouldn’t have been that easy.

  Molly lifted her face from her hands and looked at him. He didn’t want to meet her gaze but, eventually, he did. He had to.

  “What the fuck, Brody?”

  “Give me your phone,” he said.

  * * *

  He stepped out of the car with his own and Molly’s cell phones in one hand, and the replica pistol in the other.

  “What are you doing, Brody?” Molly struggled to get out on her side, clumsily gathering her crutches while pushing the door open. Brody had yanked the phone from her pocket when she refused to give it to him. Now he tossed it on the stony ground, dropped to one knee, and smashed the screen with the butt of the pistol.