I sang at a club on Central Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, and my voice was the kind of voice that made men forget their names. Not literally--though it probably did, for about three seconds--but the kind of voice that made them reach for their wallets and their pride and both of them came out thinner than they expected.

The club was too small for a name. It was the place where the cops came to drink and the dancers came to work and the men who ran the waterfront came to think they were invisible. They weren't. But they paid well.

Ruby was my twin, and she lived in a Spanish-style villa in Hancock Park with marble floors and a piano she couldn't play and a man named Sal Marchetti who controlled half the ports in Southern California. Ruby was Sal's mistress, and she wore diamond bracelets like other women wore perfume, and she had a knife scar across her left cheek.

Ruby's scar was not attractive or harmless. It was real. A jealous wife with a kitchen knife and a grudge. Ruby couldn't show her face to anyone with that scar. Not even to the FBI.

Agent Vince Deluca found us three days after the knife. He was a tall man with a face like a hammer and eyes like a man who had seen too much of the world and not enough of himself. He sat at our table, ordered whiskey, and told us he needed help taking down Sal Marchetti.

Ruby laughed. "I'm just a singer's twin, Agent. What could I possibly know?"

"What you know is what Sal does on Tuesday nights. What you know is which warehouse he uses for the shipments. And what you know, Miss Valentine, is that if you don't help us, someone else is going to ask you questions."

She sent me the next day. She dressed me in her best dress--black, form-fitting--and practiced her accent with me for two hours in the mirror. Ruby's accent was California, light and easy. My accent was Central Avenue, lower and rougher.

I went to the FBI field office wearing Ruby's dress and speaking with Ruby's voice, and Agent Vince Deluca looked at me with eyes that were tired and suspicious and hungry all at the same time.

Over the next six weeks, I fed him information about Sal's operations. During our meetings--always in diners, always with the lights too bright--I noticed something. Vince wasn't just gathering evidence against Sal. He was gathering evidence to prove that Sal had ordered a hit on a man named Tommy Valentine six years ago.

Tommy Valentine was my father.

The official story was a gambling debt gone wrong. My mother had told me: a man came to the house, asked for money, my father didn't have it, and the man shot him. My mother had cried for a year and then stopped, and she worked double shifts at a hospital until the stress gave her an ulcer and she died three years later. I was twenty-one and alone and ready for anything that promised to make me feel something other than empty.

Vince didn't know I was Tommy's daughter. He knew Ruby was Sal's mistress. He didn't know Ruby had a twin. He didn't know the woman feeding him information was the daughter of the man Sal had killed.

I stood at a crossroads. I could continue feeding Vince and let the FBI take down Sal--avenge my father and free myself from Ruby's shadow. Or I could use Vince to eliminate Ruby, who had stolen everything from me for twenty-six years.

I chose neither. I chose something worse.

I led Vince to Sal's warehouse at midnight, knowing it would end in blood. I told him Sal would be there with the Long Beach shipment. I told him the warehouse would be guarded by four men. I told him to bring his gun and his friends and his God.

Vince believed me. Of course he believed me.

The shootout lasted four minutes and seventeen seconds. Four minutes and seventeen seconds that changed everything.

Sal was dead. Vince was wounded but alive. Ruby was gone--vanished with Sal's money and a new identity. The four guards were dead too.

I walked out of the warehouse bleeding from a shoulder wound--a graze, not serious, but enough to make me feel alive--and got in my Ford and drove east into the Mojave Desert.

I didn't know where I was going. The city lights shrank in the rearview mirror until they disappeared, and the desert was dark and endless and indifferent, and I drove without a destination, and for the first time in my life, that was exactly what I wanted.

The desert didn't care about my name. The desert didn't care about my face. The desert didn't care that I was a singer or a twin or a sister or a daughter or an informant or a fugitive or a woman with a bullet wound in her shoulder.

I didn't turn around.

---

OTMES Objective Codes:
TI=8.5(T8) M1=10 M4=7 M5=8 M3=7 R=0.0 I=5 N=2 theta=135deg
Style: Film Noir | Era: 1947 Los Angeles | POV: 1st Female
Theme: Power/Moral Ambiguity | Ending: Zero Redemption

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: