Usuality Page 6

  “Calm down, Juan,” said Garrett. “This isn’t her fault.”

  “Ju’an!” yelled their driver. “It’s Ju’an, motherfucker. Jew-on.”

  Garrett ignored him. “Look,” he said, twisting so he could look directly at Reagan. “I made the delivery. I did what I was supposed to do. Michelle Lyon asked me to stay—at least I think she asked me. That part’s a little fuzzy. Everybody else left—”

  “Of course they did.” Reagan rolled her eyes. “Did you sleep with her? You slept with her, didn’t you.”

  “—everybody except for this other woman,” continued Garrett, “who was the assistant of the director.”

  “Director? What director?”

  “She gave me a drink,” continued Garrett, “and when I wake up it’s hours later and dark, and that cocksucker Bill Silverman is wearing a ski mask and pulls a gun on me—”

  “Say he did,” said Ju’an, interested in spite of himself. In the back seat Reagan was pinching the bridge of her nose again.

  “Goddammit, Rae! I’m telling the truth. He was there taking blackmail photographs. Whatever the assistant gave me, it was supposed to knock me out for hours, but it didn’t work right and I woke up early. Here, I can prove it.”

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out Bill Silverman’s phone.

  “This isn’t yours.”

  He handed the phone to Reagan. “Just look at the photo gallery.”

  Reagan made an exasperated sound. “You don’t have to make excuses, Garrett...”

  She trailed off. She had swiped the touch screen and her eyes flicked up to meet his in the mirror.

  Garrett told them everything.

  XIII: UP IN HIS BUSINESS

  When he was finished nobody spoke.

  Garrett watched customers entering the Whole Foods while others exited, laden with groceries. He looked at his watch. He still remembered the day Reagan had given it to him. It had been sunny and cold, the clean kind of cold that fostered dreams of umbrella drinks and absolved warm-weather sins and transgressions.

  He thought about Reagan, about the phone, about the people who were suddenly after him. He had been intending to keep Reagan out of it. That ought to count for something. He told himself it wasn’t because he still had feelings for her. Things were just complicated, was all.

  His gaze wandered to the back seat. Reagan’s hair was up in a ponytail. He hadn’t seen her wear it that way since they were kids. It was flattering, sexy. She saw him looking and he quickly glanced away.

  She looked strong yet vulnerable sitting back there, and so very different from the way he saw her whenever she was pawning off yet another third rate assignment on him. Although they hadn’t been all bad, the jobs, he had to admit that. He’d had some halfway decent chances that he’d blown. It hadn’t been entirely Reagan’s fault. It scared him to think how much he relied on her, how much of a constant she was in his life. He trusted her. He felt bad that she was involved, but at the same time he was relieved that she was there. She would know what to do. She always did.

  “I think we should go to the police,” said Reagan.

  Ju’an exploded, “The Po-lice? Get the fuck up outta my car!”

  Garrett sighed. “What do we tell them? Hi, I’m Garrett Lindsay and I just found Carmen Sandiego? We don’t even know what happened. Michelle Lyon wasn’t kidding; OriCAL’s lawyers will destroy us if we breathe a word of why I was still in the apartment. What I don’t understand—”

  Reagan hugged herself. “Why do you always need to understand the why? Sometimes things just happen. Maybe going to the police isn’t the answer—”

  “It isn’t.”

  “—But you still ought to,” she insisted. “It’s what people do when they’re in trouble.”

  Garrett looked into the passenger side mirror. If they were being followed he couldn’t tell. How would he? He wasn’t used to this sort of thing, wasn’t used to feeling watched or worrying that at any moment somebody might jump out like Mr. Peanut and threaten them or worse.

  “What about those guys back there? The fake Russians.”

  “I don’t know, Garrett.”

  “And what about Hipster Ninja or whoever-the-hell he was? He was after me. He shouldn’t know about my having the phone. Who sent him? I can’t go home, Rea. I can’t go back to that building, I can’t go back to my apartment.”

  “Marin’s apartment,” said Reagan.

  Garrett gave her a sour look.

  “My apartment,” he insisted. “And you’re forgetting that Silverman is connected to me through your agency. This is what I’ve been trying to tell you. If I’m involved then you are, too. Even if I turn myself in, what’s to stop these guys from coming after you? I’m trying to protect you, Rea.”

  Reagan’s frustration spilled over. “Then why did you take Silverman’s phone in the first place? You had no reason to take it!”

  “I thought the photos might be useful.”

  “For what, jerking off?”

  “Among other things. Bill Silverman called it leverage.” Garrett felt the jab sting more than it should have. Reagan of all people ought to be more understanding. It had been a heat-of-the-moment decision.

  “This is why they’re after you. Why they’re after us.”

  “How do you know that? You don’t know that.”

  “It never once occurred to you that bad things might happen if you took a phone with blackmail pictures on it?”

  Ju’an, who had been listening while Reagan’s voice steadily rose in pitch, said, “When was the last time you ate?”

  “I’m fine, Ju’an,” she snapped. “What’s going on with you, Garrett?” She held both hands over her belly protectively. “This isn’t like you, getting mixed up in something like this.”

  “You’re forgetting the part where I was roofied.”

  “And you would have told everybody that you and Michelle Lyon had sex, just like she intended. Don’t deny it. Don’t pretend to be the victim here. Any woman could drug you and have their way with you, and you wouldn’t care.” She crossed her arms. “Am I wrong?”

  “That’s messed up,” said Ju’an. “No means rape. Just cause he’s a man don’t mean you can get all up in his business.”

  “This isn’t you,” Reagan told Garrett, ignoring the driver.

  “What isn’t?”

  “Blackmail.”

  Hearing the word out loud once more made it finally start to feel real. They’d just been harmless photos on a phone, after all. He hadn’t taken them. He hadn’t done anything at all to Michelle Lyon and still she’d drugged him. He wasn’t a womanizer. Not really. Just a romantic. Was it a crime to fall a little bit in love with every woman he met? Jade hadn’t understood it. Neither did Marin. Reagan understood it, even though she thought it made him an asshole. But Bill Silverman was twice the asshole he could ever be. Taking blackmail photographs, obsessing over some ludicrous fantasy involving his writing partner, unable to face reality. With all his sleazy ambition, the man had been a menace. But he hadn’t been wrong. The world didn’t foster dreamers. Hollywood took a perverse pleasure in pulverizing hopes and aspirations wholesale.

  “You’re right,” said Garrett. “I’m better than this. But where’s it gotten me? Where’s it gotten us? The rules are only there so that the successful people can stay on top.”

  “I need to eat something,” Reagan interrupted. “I can’t listen to this.” She reached forward and dropped the phone into Garrett’s lap. “Stay here. I’m going inside.”

  “Wait,” said Garrett. “It isn’t safe.”

  “It’s a grocery store, for God’s sake.”

  Reagan opened the door. Christ, how she hated that she didn’t hate Garrett for this. She didn’t blame him for taking the phone. Under other circumstances she would have been impressed. He needed to take chances, to stop thinking with his dick and his heart and neglecting opportunities at every bend. He needed more ambition; it was just his luck that this
would be the one time he picked to run with it.

  “Wait,” called Ju’an.

  Reagan leaned back into the car. “Really, I get that you’re both concerned, but I’ll be fine. Whoever they are, they’re only after the phone. Honestly, I’m safer away from it.”

  “Naw, man,” said Ju’an. “I just wanted you to get me a candy bar.”

  XIV: SWING SET AND A MISS

  “She shouldn’t have gone in alone.”

  “Oh, now you’re all concerned about her welfare?”

  “Of course I care about her. Turn the music down, I can barely think.”

  “You did not just talk about my motherfucking music,” said Ju’an.

  “Hey, I’m having a rough day. I didn’t ask for any of this to happen. Maybe it was a mistake to switch out the phones. Maybe I screwed up.”

  Ju’an snorted. He pushed the button to roll down his window. “You wanted to level the playing field, but instead got a taste of your own motherfucking medicine. You discovered the Man has the power, and now you think you all entitled and shit. Like the choices you make don’t have consequences for anybody but you.”

  “You’re the one who brought Reagan here. You got her involved.”

  Ju’an’s smile disappeared.

  “She told me to.”

  “Must be nice, doing whatever people tell you to. Never having to think for yourself.”

  “You care about her so much, what are you still doing here?”

  “I’m here because—” Garrett broke off. “Oh, forget it. What gives you the right to tell me what a screw-up I am? Why am I still here? Why are you still here?”

  Ju’an twisted his hands on the steering wheel. Then, abruptly, he let go. “That’s a good question, asshole.”

  Reaching past Garrett, Ju’an grabbed the handle and shoved open the passenger door. Contorting one leg until his alligator skin size-fourteens connected squarely with Garrett’s shoulder, he booted Garrett unceremoniously out of the SUV. Tossing the phone after him, Ju’an stepped on the accelerator. Tires squealed and the vehicle peeled out of the lot.

  Garrett lay where he had fallen, sprawled out on the pavement. Up above the city, a handful of the brightest stars were visible through the thickening fog. It was dark, but the city was restless. Artificial light made the streets seem like they ought to be clean and sterile and new, but they were none of those things. Life in the city was none of those things. Graffiti covered the bus stops. Paint everywhere was peeling like old, dried-out skin. Transients camped in the open with the sum total of their lives reduced to plastic bags and dirty blankets and treasures, broken dreams strewn around them like tattered newspaper. Displaced from the world, watching life barely slow as it passed them by.

  Garrett felt the weight of his own dreams and hopes and worries lift until he, too, felt displaced.

  He was an asshole, fine. He was at peace with that fact. It didn’t mean he was a lost cause. His dreams probably were. Dreams were mercurial. No matter how small or how big, you either found them suddenly having become reality, or, just as suddenly, you realized they were still a million miles away. Taking the phone had been stupid. He didn’t have a clue what he might do with leverage like that. He wasn’t at all familiar with the mechanics of building, running, and maintaining a career, but he did know that leverage was something you applied to stoke a fire that was already burning. If you used it to try and jump start things it was like dumping a can of gas over a pile of kindling: it might cost you more than your eyebrows. He was someone who enjoyed women more than was good for him, a dreamer and deadbeat, but a pyromaniac he was not.

  He thought about Brody, the son he never saw, not because he didn’t want to but because his ex, Brittany, was adamant that he stay away, reminding him whenever he called of how inconsequential he was to Brody’s life. She had remarried quickly. Her new husband had a Decent Job and a house in Daly City in an immaculate neighborhood that looked like it belonged on the set of a Fifties sitcom. The new husband had taken to Brody immediately. Everybody could tell the kid would grow up to be beautiful just like Garrett, and beautiful men had inherent potential. The boy had blond hair and blue eyes to match his perfect, miniature features, and a cocky, entitled nature that Garrett was certain he got from his stepfather. The weekends Garrett had spent with Brody in the last few years had been painfully awkward. He still had a mental image of the small boy he had watched on his ex-wife’s porch, digging around a potted plant for little round pill bugs that balled up when he touched them. Polies, he had called them. Polies and ceiling fans had been the boy’s two favorite things. Garrett couldn’t understand it, couldn’t understand anything about the tiny person he’d contributed genes to and little else.

  Sometimes it seemed like the son he hardly knew might be the only legacy Garrett would leave behind.

  Brody’s mother, Brittany, had never held a candle to Reagan. They’d disliked one another on sight in high school, him and Brittany, but they’d reconnected in college. Open minds and widening horizons took full advantage of their spiteful familiarity, turning it on its head. They continued to find themselves waking up in the other’s apartment even after their dislike returned with a vengeance. Soon it was compounded by the resentment of a hasty marriage and the fact that, with the arrival of Brody, they were going to be tied together for the rest of their lives. They’d already lasted longer than had been healthy for either of them.

  When Reagan had come back into his life once again, he hadn’t told her about Brittany. He’d convinced Reagan to sign him as a client with equal parts charm and emphasis on their past together. He’d had the chance to be forthright and blown it, knowing at the time that it was the sort of thing that only got harder to tell if you didn’t take the chance to do so up front.

  And then, almost inevitably, came the night that he and Reagan’s lifelong platonic facade had slipped. It had been a Tuesday and he would never forget the way her body felt pressed against his own…

  The sound of Reagan’s cursing tore Garrett’s focus back from the stars.

  “Down here,” he said. “I’m—”

  “Lying on the ground like a moron. Yes, I can see that. But why are you lying on the ground like a moron?”

  “I was thinking.”

  “That you wanted to see things from a different perspective? Here’s an idea: pick someplace besides a parking lot to be philosophical. Moron,” she added again for good measure. She shook her head. Then, out of the blue she smiled at Garrett for the first time in he couldn’t remember how long. “You ever think about that night when we biked to Burr’s for ice cream and then ended up at that park with the swing sets, the one you swore up and down was a secret park that only you knew about?”

  Garrett sat up. “Not really,” he lied.

  It had been freshman year in high school. They hadn’t seen each other since third grade and had looked at one another in surprise when roll was called in English class. Their shared history paved the way for them to become friends while all their classmates were still fumbling with one-word sentences around the opposite sex. It had helped that Garrett had always been better at making friends with girls than boys, and that Reagan had been a tomboy with an above average sense of humor.

  Years later, he still remembered that night vividly, how they’d gone to the park and swung on the swing set together until well after dark. He knew, looking back, that if he’d tried to kiss her that night she would have let him. He’d known it at the time, too, but he hadn’t and they’d spent the rest of high school slowly drifting apart.

  And now somehow, years later, they’d ended up together in the parking lot of the Whole Foods, Garrett sprawled out on the ground getting his tux dirty and Reagan pregnant and staring down at him, a half-eaten bagel in her hand. Life was funny sometimes.

  Garrett tried to think of something to say, but words were always tricky for him when Reagan was around. Thankfully, the Escalade chose that moment to reappear. It turned into the lot from the s
ame direction they’d come the first time; Ju’an had circled the block to come back.

  Garrett’s temper flared. Their driver was as much of a menace as Silverman.

  “Where’d he go?” said Reagan.

  “He forgot to tell me when he kicked me out the door and drove off.”

  Reagan looked at him like she didn’t believe him.

  “Baby-Daddy called looking for you,” said Ju’an, getting out of the still-running SUV and coming around to open the door for Reagan. “Why’d your ass have to go and tell him you were with me?”

  “I didn’t have your number in my phone.”

  Ju’an snorted.

  “What did he want?” asked Garrett.

  “He says bring you to his place. Both of you. Says he’s concerned.”

  “No,” said Reagan worriedly. “We can’t involve him in this.”

  Ju’an shrugged. “Fine with me. I’m my own boss now. I don’t owe him shit.”

  “Nick told you to come back and get us?” Garrett smirked. “And you’re your own boss now?”

  “Nick doesn’t tell Ju’an what to do, and he doesn’t tell me what to do either,” snapped Reagan.

  Garrett wondered what was on the bagel she was eating. He’d never known her to stand up to her fiancé. Not that he wasn’t on the same page; the less they involved Mr. Taxi himself, Nick “Master-of-the-Middle-Age-Buzzcut” Polito, the better.

  He didn’t know what Reagan saw in the guy. Nick bought her Louis Vuitton purses, sure. He was solid and stable, a fast talker with plenty of charisma when he wanted it, but so what? He was too old for her, for one thing. He wore short-sleeved button downs under his suit coat, untucked because he thought it flattered his barrel of a torso that way. He had arms made bulky from plenty of red meat and bench presses, but the rest of him was out of shape. His temper was what made him formidable. He was a bully. Garrett had seen it the first time they’d met. The man had eyes that said boy-next-door, but they were set in a face that guaranteed all the duplicity of a lawyer and twice the predictability. He was, reflected Garrett, exactly the kind of man Garrett wished he had as an agent, which made him exactly the kind of man Reagan should never in a million years be engaged to. Not that she’d ever asked his opinion on the subject.