Free Hailey's War by Jodi Compton

everything.
    Two days later, I was awakened by my phone ringing at ten-fifteen in the morning. I picked up the receiver and found myself talking to the traffic sergeant who’d taken my statement and then kicked me loose. His question was direct and to the point: Had Miss Beauvais, Trey’s au pair, been in touch with me?
    No, I said, why would she have been?
    I’m just checking in with you, he’d said.
    Not seeing any significance, I tried to go back to sleep—I hadn’t been sleeping well at night—but an hour later, CJ was pounding on my door.
    â€œTake it easy, would you,” I said, pushing hair out of my eyes and letting him in.
    â€œPack up your things,” he said as soon as I’d closed the door behind him. “Not everything, just what you really want.”
    â€œWhat?” I thought it was a joke, though he seemed genuinely on edge.
    â€œTrey’s nanny is missing. The cops are looking for her. Nobody’s seen her. Pack up just what you need, I’m getting you out of L.A.”
    I pulled back. “What are you trying to say?”
    CJ ran his hands through his hair. “Just listen to me, Hailey. I didn’t want to scare you the other night, but as soon as you told me Trey Marsellus’s name, I was thinking of something like this. I hoped I was overreacting.”
    â€œSomething like what?”
    â€œThis happened in New York,” he said. “A mobster’s son was hit by a car, by accident, and not long after that, the neighbor who did it just disappeared.”
    I said, “You of all people know that ‘gangsta’ is just a figure of speech. Marsellus isn’t really a gangster.”
    â€œYes, he is, Hailey.” He paused. “I hear things, and maybe I don’t know for sure what’s rumor and what’s fact, but I meant what I said the other day, when I called Marsellus ‘heavy.’ He’s not a ‘no harm, no foul’ kind of guy. And he and his wife tried for years to conceive before finally having Trey. She hasn’t been pregnant again since. What does that tell you?” He answered his own question: “You took from him the one thing that can’t be replaced.”
    My face felt hot. “Don’t you think I feel bad enough—”
    â€œYou’re not
listening,”
he said. I’d never heard CJ sound so frustrated. “Goddammit, what’s it going to take to get through to you? You can feel as bad as humanly possible; it won’t help. You killed this guy’s only son. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to fix it.”
    I said, “But if he’s really the kind of man you say, I think not apologizing and then running away is only going to make it worse.”
    â€œThere isn’t a way to make it better.”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œNo,” he said, taking both my hands in his. “I know what you’re thinking of, all that honor-and-duty bullshit you never really left behind, but that doesn’t apply out here, and it’s going to get you killed. West Point is over, and now L.A. is over for you, too. Pack your things.”
    What convinced me that he was right was this: His hands were very slightly shaking. It had been a long time since I’d felt those kind of nerves, so his anxiety served as a kind of external gauge for me, of what I should be feeling but wasn’t.
    â€œAre you sure about this?” I’d said.
    â€œI don’t like it, either, baby,” he’d said quietly. “But this is how it’s gotta be.”
    To this day I don’t know if there were any ramifications, criminally, for my leaving town before the traffic division’s investigation was officially closed. It had just been a formality, but the cops took a dim view of people skating when they’d been told to stick around. It was possiblethat if I was ever picked up on something minor in San Francisco, I’d be shipped back to