Holy crap! My first irrational thought as I stared at the barrel of Amazon’s gun was that not only was I being dumped for a tall woman, I was being dumped for a psycho! (Hey, I said it was irrational.) The second was pure thankfulness that Ramirez had quick cop reflexes. In a split second he had his gun unhol-stered and pointed at Amazon in a Mexican standoff.
“Isabel, drop the gun, ” he commanded, his voice the only calm thing in the room.
As soon as the guns had popped out, people started screaming and scattering. The Survivor chick dove under a table, and the CW actors trampled over the Olsen twin look-alike in a mad dash for the front doors. The deejay stopped spinning music, ducking behind a pair of speakers, and all I could hear now was the sound of glass breaking and a chorus of hysterical voices yelling, “Call nine-one-one.” I’m pretty sure I picked one of them out as Dana’s.
“Isabel, ” Ramirez prompted again.
“No way!” she shouted, tightening her grip on me until my vision started going blurry. “No fucking way.”
“Isabel, let’s just calm down.”
“I’m not calming nothing, you pig. This is a setup. I told you, no other cops.”
“She’s not a cop, Isabel, ” Ramirez ground out past his clenched jaw.
“Honest!” I squeaked. “I never even made it as a Girl Scout.”
“Shut up!” she commanded, pushing the barrel into my temple.
I shut up.
“Isabel, listen to me, ” Ramirez said. He was slowly inching closer to her, his gun straight-armed in front of him. “Just set the gun down and you can walk out of here right now. No one has to get hurt.”
She shook her head, long black hair flapping wildly around her face. “Uh-uh. No way, pal. I know you’ve got this place surrounded. You’ve got cops outside waiting for me. You set me up. And quit moving closer!”
I heard Ramirez mutter the word Jesus under his breath and send me another dagger-sharp look. “I didn’t set you up. She’s not a cop, Isabel. She’s my…” He paused.
I held my breath and leaned forward. Date? Lover? Girlfriend? Come on, for the love of God, finish the sentence, man!
“…friend, ” he finally said.
Jerk.
“I don’t care who she is, ” Crazy Isabel responded. “She’s coming with me.” She shifted her hold on me, grabbing me by the arm with one hand and stuffing the gun into my ribs with the other.
“And don’t you try to follow me, pig. I’ll kill her. I’ll happily splatter her brains all over this room.”
I winced. Granted, this entire episode was proving just how very few brains I had. (Why, oh, why hadn’t I just sat at home neurotically wondering what my boyfriend was doing like a normal girl?) But I wanted to keep my brains right where they were, thank you very much.
I saw the muscles in Ramirez’s jaw flinch, but he kept the gun steady on her. “Don’t do anything stupid, Isabel.”
Isabel ignored him, dancing me backward as she made her way to the nearest exit sign. Ramirez stood rooted to the spot, his eyes intense, watching the gap between us widen.
This was bad. Seeing Ramirez with another woman wasn’t so hot, but this? This was big-steaming-piles-of-cow-dung bad.
Isabel pushed through the emergency exit, sounding a fire alarm that whipped the panicked crowd into a frenzy again. A bartender yelled, “Fire!” and I saw two girls in halter tops shove Dana out of the way, dashing like linebackers to the front doors. Unfortunately, Dana knocked into Mr. How-You-Doin’, sending him teetering backward and colliding with Ramirez. Ramirez staggered back a step-which was just enough to make his aim waver. Isabel took that opportunity to bolt.
“Come on, Blondie, ” she said as the door slammed shut behind us. Keeping her vise grip on my arm, she kicked off her mules and sprinted through the parking lot.
“Where are we going?” I asked as I stumbled after her, breaking a heel and stubbing my toe on the asphalt.
“Shut up!” she said. Then she paused, scanning the lot. “I need a car.”
I pointed to a green VW Bug. “How about that one?” Not that I was actually into helping the crazy lady make a great escape, but I figured the faster she got away from here, the smaller the chance I was going to pee in my pants. If there was one thing I hated in life, it was having guns pointed at me.
“A bug? What, do I look like a midget to you?” she asked, whipping her long hair around again.
I narrowed my eyes. Was that a crack about my height?
“Okay, how about that one then?” I gestured to a blue pickup with a COWGIRL UP sticker in the back window.
Isabel turned on me. “What about me exactly screams redneck?”
“You know, you’re awfully picky for a woman on the run.”
“Shut up!” Isabel shoved the gun in my face again.
The chances of my peeing my pants just rose astronomically. I clamped my mouth shut.
Isabel looked over my shoulder and apparently found a vehicle to her liking. Her face broke into a grin. “Now that’s more like it.” She tightened her grip on my arm and dragged me with her, weaving through the rows of parked cars toward a big black Escalade in the corner. She peeked in the driver’s-side window. The valet had left the keys in the ignition. “Chumps, ” she said, through a big creepy smile.
She was jiggling the door handle when the emergency exit flew open again and Ramirez’s voice rang out across the parking lot.
“Isabel!”
Without skipping a beat, she spun around, raised her arm, and fired in the direction of his voice. A bullet shattered the passenger-side window of the VW.
“Shit, ” I heard Ramirez cry as Isabel popped off three more rounds in the direction of the midget car. “Maddie?” he called.
“I’m okay, ” I replied. “She just really hates that car.”
“Shut up!” Isabel screamed. “What are you, stupid? What don’t you understand about ‘shut up’?”
I clamped my lips together and did a zipping-them-up-and-throwing-away-the-key thing.
“Isabel, let’s talk about this. We can work something out, ” Ramirez said from behind the VW. I vaguely heard the sound of sirens in the distance.
Isabel must have heard them too, because her only response was to blow out the VW’s back windows. Clearly Isabel wasn’t in the mood to talk.
But there was one good thing about the crazy lady shooting at my boyfriend: the gun wasn’t pointed at me anymore.
I took a deep breath and, with my one good heel, stomped down on her bare foot as hard as I could.
“Sonofabitch!” she cried. It stunned her just enough for her to loosen the grip on my arm. That was all I needed. I turned and ran as hard as I could on one broken heel in the opposite direction, diving behind a Ford Festiva just as I heard a bullet rip into its tires.
“You blonde bitch!” Isabel howled, sending a wild spray of bullets across the parking lot.
I ducked, covering my head and praying the Festiva wasn’t as cheaply made as it looked. If only I’d ducked behind a Hummer instead.
“Maddie?” Ramirez cried again from the other side of the lot. But I was honestly too paralyzed with fear to respond. I just sat there, my arms wrapped around my head, my knees tucked to my chest, my heart beating faster than when Dana made me crank the Stair-Master up to six.
The gunfire paused for a second, then was immediately followed by the sound of tires squealing. I peeked my head up over the shot-out window of the Festiva just in time to see Isabel’s wild hair flying through the driver’s-side window of the Escalade as it screamed out of the lot.
“Maddie?” Broken glass crunched under Ramirez’s feet as he sprinted across the lot to where I was still doing a fetal position.
“I’m okay.” Sort of. I looked down. In my dive for cover, I’d skinned both my knees. My big toe on my right foot was bleeding, turning my Passionate Pink pedicure into something out of a horror movie, and my Nina pumps would never be the same again. But, on the upside, I hadn’t wet my pants.
“Are you sure?” Ramirez asked, suddenly at my side. He lifted me up and ran his hands quickly over my arms and legs. Too quickly, if you asked me. I wouldn’t have minded if he lingered just a little longer in the thigh region. Yep, I had it so bad for Ramirez that even gunfire didn’t deter those overactive little hormones of mine. Geez, maybe I should accompany Dana to her next SA meeting.
“I’m fine, really, ” I said, shaking off the inappropriate thoughts.
Satisfied, he stood back and looked at me. The concern in his dark eyes slowly faded into annoyance-and not the kind of annoyance you feel when telemarketers call at dinnertime, but the kind where your insecure friend spurs an insane Amazon woman to take her hostage, which results in your getting shot at. Yep, that was the level of annoyance making the little blue vein in his neck start to bulge and his jaw set harder than the granite Clinique counters.
I bit my lip and shuffled my heel-less shoe. I looked down at his beer-stained shirt. “Um…sorry about the Budweiser.”
He just shook his head and muttered another, “Jesus, ” under his breath.
Two hours later the Cabana Club parking lot was still swarming with police officers, and Ramirez was still giving me the evil eye. Which, as I sat on the tailgate of an ambulance wrapped in an ugly green blanket waiting for paramedics to give me the all-clear to go home, was kind of unfair. I mean, it wasn’t like I meant to get taken hostage. And it wasn’t as if I were the one who’d shot at him. In fact, if I’d had my way, we’d be at my place, sprawled across my futon going for round two of “or something” by now. So, really, this was all Ramirez’s fault. (What can I say? Twelve years of Catholic school had taught me how to reassign guilt with the best of them.)
“Ohmigod, honey, check out the cop at three o’clock, ” Dana said, standing beside me. After the club had cleared out the panic-stricken singles, Dana had found me in the parking lot watching uniformed officers drape crime-scene tape around the remnants of the VW. I was grateful for the hand to hold, since it was clear from the whole evil-eye thing that Ramirez and I wouldn’t be holding hands anytime soon. But the sight of so many men in uniform was almost too much for Miss Sexual Sobriety.
I turned my head to the left.
“No, ” Dana said, pointing to the right. “I said three o’clock.”
“Why didn’t you just say, ‘right, ’ then?” I mumbled, eyeing the object of Dana’s ogling. A tall, slim guy with a big nose and dark hair, dressed in uniform blues, slouched near the rear entrance, questioning the Olsen twin.
“He is delish!” Dana made the kind of yummy sound in her throat that I usually reserved for the tiramisu at Gianni’s.
“I thought you were off men?”
“Uh-huh. Oh!” she gasped. “Maddie, eleven o’clock. Blond, blue eyes, and biceps to die for!” She was practically licking her chops.
“Dana, how long has it been since you’ve had sex?”
She sighed, watching Mr. Biceps sweep shards of glass into an evidence baggie. “Way too long.” She tilted her head as he leaned over the VW, showing off glutes that, I’ll admit, had even me staring. “Since Monday. Four whole days.”
Oh, brother.
“If I make it a week, I get a chip.”
“You do realize I’ve had hangnails that have lasted longer than a week?”
Dana ignored me. “Uh-oh. Bad news at four o’clock.”
I turned my head to the left.
“No.” Dana grabbed my chin and tilted my head right. “Four o’clock.”
Uh-oh was right. Ramirez was picking his way over the broken glass, evidence cones, and shot-out car parts, headed right toward us. And by the rigid set of his shoulders, this was not going to be a friendly sort of chat.
“Um, maybe I’ll just…um…” Dana trailed off, wisely giving Bad Cop a wide berth as she joined the rest of the looky-loos behind the yellow crime-scene tape.
Ramirez barely acknowledged her as she passed, his eyes boring in on me, his arms crossed over his chest. He stopped in front of me, shaking his head, his unreadable Bad Cop face reminding me of the one my Irish Catholic grandmother had used when she’d interrogated my five-year-old self about which “creative” little girl had drawn all over her kitchen walls with a Crayola.
He didn’t say anything, just gave me that hard stare. I bit my lip, vowing not to be the one who spoke first. Okay, so I’d kind of mucked up his evening, but he’d started it by going out with Crazy Chick in the first place.
I crossed my own arms over my own chest, narrowed my eyes at him, and prepared to wait him out.
We stood like that for a full five seconds.
One guess who cracked first.
“Okay, so here’s the thing: I had this thong, and it was totally cute, and it was going to waste just sitting at home watching TV, and I wouldn’t have minded so much, but you were canceling our ‘or something, ’ and, unlike Dana, I haven’t gotten any ‘or something’ in over a week-that’s long enough to get a chip at SA, you know! And then ‘something’ came up and you didn’t want me meeting your friends, even though I’m so not smothery, and then you were at a hookup club. I mean, you could have told me she was carrying a gun and I so wouldn’t have come. Or at least I would have waited outside. So, I’m sorry you got shot at.”
Ramirez just shook his head at me, and I wasn’t sure if he thought I was pathetic or was just trying to keep from laughing at me.
“Maddie, you seriously thought I was here on a date?”
“Um, well, yeah. I mean, with that message you left and the hookup bar, what was I supposed to think?”
Ramirez rolled his eyes at me. “Isabel was an informant, Maddie. She’s the girlfriend of a major drug distributor and she was meeting me to give me details about the next shipment coming into his organization. Information that we could have used to get these guys off the streets for good.”
I felt myself growing smaller and smaller the more he talked. “Oops.”
“Oops?” He raised an eyebrow at me. “Oops! Seven people injured, thousand of dollars in property damage, one stolen vehicle, and three weeks’ worth of investigative work down the toilet and all you can say is ‘oops’?”
If I grew any smaller I’d be looking up at the bottom of my broken heel. “Oops, sorry?”
He narrowed his eyes and made a growling sound deep in his throat.
Suddenly I kind of wished Isabel had taken me with her.
“It would be one thing, ” he said through clenched teeth, “if this were an isolated incident. But this isn’t the first time you’ve butted into a police investigation. What, exactly, do you suggest I tell my superiors?”
I bit my lip again, eating off any remnants of lip gloss. He was right. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time I’d stuck my nose into his police business. That was actually the way we’d met. He’d been investigating my last boyfriend, a prominent L.A. attorney, for fraud and, subsequently, murder. I’d sort of inadvertently gotten in the middle of that investigation when I’d popped the real murderer’s breast implant and stabbed her in the jugular with a stiletto heel. After that there’d been the incident last fall involving my father, a bunch of drag queens, and the mob, which had ended with me getting kidnapped and Dana blowing a hole through some guy’s chest. So, I could see why this was something of a sore spot with him. Not to mention his superiors.
“Look, Jack, I’m really, really sorry.”
He took a deep breath and did some more head shaking. He opened his mouth to say more, but was cut off by the uniformed officer with the cute butt.
“Hey, Ramirez?”
“What?” Ramirez called over his shoulder.
“It’s the captain.” Buns of Steel held up a cell phone. “He wants to speak to you.”
Ramirez shut his eyes in a two-second meditation. “Shit.” He turned and grabbed the cell phone, then paused, jabbing a finger my way. “You-go home. We’ll talk later.”
I nodded meekly. Later was good. Later was after he’d had time to calm down and hopefully gotten that whole bulging-vein thing under control.
After Buns of Steel took my statement (where I relayed the events of the evening as best I could without making it sound like his coworker was dating a loony) and the paramedics checked me out (scrapes and unattractive bruises, but not much more), Dana bundled me into her Saturn and drove me home. She offered to stay the night with me, but from the way she was frothing at the mouth over every guy we passed (including the greasy-haired attendant at the Chevron station), I figured she needed an SA meeting more than I needed a sleepover.
Instead, I climbed the steps to my cozy second-story studio alone. Cozy, of course, being real estate slang for dinky. My foldout futon, a drawing table, and three dozen pairs of shoes had the place fuller than Paris Hilton’s BlackBerry. Still, it was near the ocean, relatively quiet, and most important, fell within my cozy budget.
As a young girl I had dreamed of being a runway model in Paris. But since, as I may have mentioned, I top out at just below Tom Cruise height, genetics worked against that career plan. Instead, I went to the Academy of Art College and got a degree in fashion design-namely, designing shoes. Unfortunately, the job sounds way more glamorous than its paycheck. As an unknown designer, I’d been able to get steady work so far only at Tot Trots children’s shoe designs. And, thanks to my recent brushes with the law, even those jobs were becoming fewer and farther between. Sure, I was still working on the Pretty Pretty Princess patent leathers for Easter, but they’d given both the Superman flip-flops and the summer line of Disney water shoes to someone else. In hopes of someday moving beyond SpongeBob slippers, I’d lately started doing a little freelancing on the side, for-wonder of wonders-actual adults. Okay, so I’d designed and constructed a pair of purple size-thirteen sequin-covered heels for my father’s birthday. (Yes, you heard me right. Father. He danced in a Las Vegas all-male “showgirl” revue.) And I’d recently put the finishing touches on my first Maddie originals for myself: pink pumps with three-inch heels, leather ankle straps, and tiny crystal details on the buckles. All in all, I was rather proud of them.
I let myself into my apartment and kicked off my abused heels, then dragged myself into the shower, careful to rinse all the bits of broken auto glass out of my hair. I pulled on an oversized Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, left over from my college days, and curled up on my futon with my TV remote. Three late-night episodes of Cheers later I was fast asleep.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d actually been asleep, but I knew it wasn’t long enough. My phone was ringing from somewhere deep inside a lovely dream of Ramirez and me doing horizontal acrobatics across my kitchen counter when I cracked one eye open to stare at the digital clock beside my bed. 6:15 A.M. Ugh. I’m not exactly what you’d call a morning person. I’m more of a stumble-out-of-bed-at-ten-and-make-a-break-for-the-nearest-Starbucks kind of person. Which may be why my voice sounded like I’d been sucking on sandpaper as I croaked out a “Hello?” in the vicinity of my phone.
“Maddie! Oh my word, honey, what happened?”
Instinctively, I pulled the phone away from my ear. 6:15 A.M. was too early for anyone to be that loud.
“Mom?” I croaked out again. “You don’t have to shout. I can hear you.”
“Sorry. I’m on a cell phone, sweetie, ” she yelled.
I felt a headache brewing between my eyes.
“Maddie, what’s going on? I was having breakfast with Mrs. Rosenblatt, and we saw a man reading the L.A. Informer at the next table. Honey, your picture was on the front page. Were you involved in a shootout last night?”
I smacked my palm to my head. Leave it to L.A.’s sleaziest tabloid to sensationalize a simple misunderstanding between a girl and her beau into a Wild West showdown at the OK Corral. “It wasn’t a shootout, Mom. Just…a misunderstanding.” Okay, I admit, when I said it out loud, the Informer’s version sounded closer to the truth.
“Are you okay? They said you were taken hostage.”
I groaned again. “Mom, I’m fine. I promise.”
“Oh honey, I’m coming over right now.”
“No!” I fairly screamed into the phone. Don’t get me wrong, I love my mother. But the last time she was in my apartment she insisted on organizing my underwear drawer, covering my cooktop in aluminum foil, and feng shui-ing the entire place by moving my television into the bathroom and my futon next to the refrigerator. “No, I’m fine, Mom, really. Never better.” Except for the headache that seemed to be spreading to my temples.
“Now, don’t try to be all adult and independent on me, Mads. I know when my baby needs me.”
I rolled my eyes. I was facing the big three-oh this year. God forbid I should be adult and independent.
“Mom-”
“Nope. No protests.”
“But-”
“And no buts.”
I rubbed my temple, hoping I still had that travel-size bottle of aspirin in my purse. “Okay, how about this, Mom. How about I just come down to the salon later? That way you wouldn’t have to drive all the way out here, and I could get my pedi fixed at the same time?” I asked, hoping for a compromise that didn’t involve rearranging my furniture.
Mom paused, considering this. Luckily, I knew how much she hated to drive the 405. “Well, if you’re sure you’re okay…”
“Right as rain!” I said, doing my best perky-cheerleader impression.
“All right. Why don’t you meet me at Fernando’s after lunch and you can tell me all about it. Okay?”
I did a silent sigh of relief. “Perfect. I’ll see you then.”
I hit the end button and flopped back down on my pillows. 6:20 A.M. and already one crisis averted. My day was off to a smashing start.