More Twisted

smelled a flowery perfume mixed with the acrid firecracker smell of smoke from the gun.
    “Me?” he asked.
    “Yeah, here.” She handed the portfolio to him.
    “This’s for me?”
    But she didn’t answer. She turned away and sprinted into the alley behind the apartment complex, a flash of vivacious color that vanished an instant later.
    As Pullman was staring in confusion at the portfolio, heheard a rustle of feet behind him and an instant later was grabbed by a half-dozen massive hands. The next thing he knew he was being slammed face-first into a patch of extremely well-raked lawn.

    Tammy Hudson, Rodney Pullman learned from his lawyer, was one of Southern California’s most successful, and most elusive, drug dealers.
    It seemed that she’d been responsible for importing thousands of pounds of high-quality cocaine from Mexico over the past year. (Hence, her frequent trips south of the border.) Driving a beat-up old sports car and living in a pathetic place like the Pacific Arms Apartments kept her off the radar screen of DEA and police officials, who found it easier to find and track the high-living kingpins in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs.
    Sitting in the LA detention center across from Pullman, the lawyer now delivered the bad news that the D.A. had no intention of dropping any of the charges against him.
    “But I didn’t do anything,” Pullman whined.
    The lawyer, a tanned forty-year-old with a fringe of curly hair, gave a chuckle, as if he’d heard that line ten thousand times. He continued, explaining that the prosecutor was out for blood. For one thing, a cop had been killed; the blond man, the apparent voyeur, had actually been an undercover LAPD officer pretending to work for the landscape maintenance company. His job was to report whenever Tammy left the apartment. Other officers or DEA agents would then take over surveillance and follow her in unmarked cars or vans. (When Pullmanthought that he was reaching into his pants in preparation for a rape, the officer was in fact merely fishing his radio out of an inside pocket to tell the other surveillance team that she was leaving.)
    “But—”
    “Let me finish.” The lawyer added that the cops were also outraged that, because of Pullman, Tammy had successfully escaped. She’d disappeared completely and the FBI and DEA believed she was probably out of the country by now.
    “But they can’t think I was working with her! Is that what they think?”
    “In a word, yeah.” He went on to say that Pullman’s explanation for the past several days’ events raised eyebrows. “To put it mildly.” For instance, the police were curious why, if he’d noticed the supposed voyeur the day before, he hadn’t told her then. If his concern, as he claimed, was for an innocent woman’s safety, why didn’t he tell her she was in danger when he’d first found out about it?
    His red-faced explanation that he wanted to use the voyeur as an excuse to introduce himself to Tammy was greeted with an expression in the lawyer’s eyes that could be read as either skepticism or embarrassment for a pathetic client. The man recorded this explanation in a few anemic notes.
    And why would he lie to his employer about being sick today? To the police, that made sense only if he was serving as Tammy’s lookout. Today’s was to be a big drug transfer and they reasoned that Pullman had stayed home to make sure Tammy got away safely to deliver the goods. Their theory was that he had figured the maintenanceworker for law and attacked him to give Tammy the chance to flee.
    Physical evidence too: both his fingerprints and hers were on the portfolio, which happened to contain no headshot photos or audition tapes but rather a kilo of very pure cocaine. “She gave it to me,” he’d said weakly. “To create a diversion, I’ll bet. So she could escape.”
    The lawyer didn’t even bother to write that one down.
    But the most damning of all was the problem with his claim that he didn’t know her. “See,” his lawyer said, “if you really didn’t know her or have any connection with her, we might get a jury to believe everything else you’re claiming.”
    “But I don’t know her. I swear.”
    The attorney gave a faint wince. “See, Rodney, there’s a problem with that.”
    “I prefer ‘Rod.’ Like I’ve said.”
    “A problem.”
    “What?” Pullman scratched his head; the cuffs jingled like dull bells.
    “They searched your apartment.”
    “Oh. They did?