Текст книги "Fangs Out"

Автор книги: David Freed

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Twenty-two

Walker paced the patio in his bathrobe, clutching a half-empty quart bottle of Jim Beam. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. He was drunk with worry. Or maybe just drunk.

“I’ve been trying her phone all day. She would’ve called if she got sidetracked. She’s never done anything like this before in her life. It’s not like her.”

Walker’s granddaughter wandered past where I was sitting at the patio table. She was wearing inflated water wings and her Little Mermaid swimsuit.

“Hello, Ryder.”

The little girl jumped feet-first into the deep end of the pool without responding, bobbed to the surface, and began dog paddling, water splashing everywhere. Walker barely noticed her. He plopped down in the chair next to mine and gulped a swallow of bourbon.

“I drove all over town this morning, looking for her.”

“You called the police?”

“They said they couldn’t take a report. Said she had to be gone twenty-four hours at least.” He gestured to the cast on my arm. “What happened to you?”

“Tripped on some stairs.”

He seemed not to hear me, absorbed in his own worries.

“It’s gotta be Ray Sheen,” he said. “He’s behind all of this. I know it. I can feel it.”

I wanted to believe that Walker was beyond reproach. He seemed legitimately upset. But all I felt was a vague queasiness that his wife’s sudden absence was the latest tangle in a web of deceit, and that a war hero I once idolized was somehow complicit in all of it.

“What makes you think Sheen had anything to do with your wife being gone, Hub?”

He glanced over his shoulder, waited until Ryder paddled to the far end of the pool, out of earshot, then looked back at me, struggling to keep his emotions in check.

“Sheen and Crissy have been carrying on for years.”

“You know that for a fact?”

He nodded. “She left the computer on by accident one night a month or so back. I saw some emails. Crissy told him it was a mistake. She wanted to end it. Sheen didn’t. He blackmailed her, threatened to tell me all about it if she broke it off.”

“Did you confront her?”

Walker shook his head and gulped more whiskey. “Like I said, she was the one who wanted to end the affair. I figured she would eventually. Then we could get back to normal, like things used to be when we first got married. I know she’d never leave me. She loves this house too much.”

I wondered whether Savannah and I would have still been together, had I embraced Walker’s arguably admirable laissez-faire attitude after discovering she and Arlo Echevarria had been carrying on behind my back. Maybe. Maybe not. Every relationship is different.

“I can’t swim!” Walker’s screaming blasted me from my reverie. He was on his feet, running toward the far end of the pool. “She’s drowning! My granddaughter!”

Ryder was hovering motionless at the bottom of the deep end, arms floating ethereally in front of her body, the two inflatable water wings lapping on the surface above.

I dove in, my eyes and cuts stinging from the chlorine, crooked my good arm around her waist and kicked our way to the edge of the pool. Walker pulled her out and sat her on the brick pool decking as I quickly hauled myself out of the water.

She lolled, lifeless as a rag doll. Her lips were periwinkle. Walker whacked her on the back a couple of times with the flat of his hand. There was no response.

“She’s not breathing! I don’t know what to do!”

I did. Every Alpha operator was certified in combat life-saving. We learned how to stanch arterial bleeds using live pigs that our instructors would anesthetize, then blast with shotguns to approximate battlefield injuries. Performing basic CPR on a child was a cakewalk by comparison.

I laid her on her back, positioned the heel of my right hand on her breastbone, and began pushing down on her chest. After thirty rapid compressions, I lowered my right ear close to her nose, my cheek over her mouth, hoping for the whisper of breath. None came.

“Ryder! Ryder, it’s Grampa! Wake up, baby girl! Please, wake up! Please!”

I tilted the little girl’s head back, pinched her nostrils, and forced the air from my lungs into hers. Her thin rib cage rose and fell. One rescue breath, then another. That’s all it took.

She coughed up water. I rolled her on her side. More water came out of her mouth and nose. Then she began wailing.

Walker scooped her up, hugging and rocking her in his lap. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he kept repeating, as much to me as to his maker.

I sat back on my knees, dripping wet and relieved, when the patio door slid open. Out stepped Crissy Walker.

“What happened?”

“She’s fine, she’s fine,” Hub said. “Just had a little accident is all.”

Crissy hurried past me and swept Ryder into her arms.

“Are you OK, honey?”

Ryder nodded and burrowed her wet face into Crissy’s chest, soaking her outfit. She was wearing gold high heels and a form-fitted, pale lavender skirt suit that showcased every reason why she’d once been Playmate of the Year.

“Where the hell have you been?” Hub demanded. “I’ve been calling you all day.”

“I told you. I had an early meeting in Los Angeles, that I’d probably be gone before you woke up.”

“No, you didn’t. You said no such thing.”

Crissy stared at him in disbelief. “Hub, we were sitting at the table, in there, having dinner. I said, ‘I have meetings tomorrow with the Animal Planet people on The Cat Communicator. Unless traffic’s bad, I’ll be home in time to make dinner. Defrost some chicken. Make sure Ryder takes her medicine.’ Do you not remember me telling you that?”

“All I remember is waking up and you were gone.”

“Baby, I’m worried about you. You’re starting to forget things.”

“You could’ve at least called to check in.”

“I turned my phone off for the meeting and forgot to turn it back on. I’m sorry, Hub.”

Walker was little appeased. Angrily, he snatched Ryder from his wife—“C’mon, baby girl, let’s get you dried off”—and marched into the house.

Crissy handed me a thick, plum-colored bath towel from among several stacked in a fancy basket near the patio door. I dried off my cast first. It seemed no worse for the dunking.

“A little partying down in Tijuana?” she said with a smirk, nodding toward my arm.

“How’d you guess?”

“What happened with Ryder?”

“One minute she was wearing her flotation devices, and the next minute, she wasn’t.”

“What was Hub doing?”

“Worrying about you.”

Crissy folded her arms and gazed toward the house. Her acrylic nails were crimson. “He’s been acting strange. Not his usual self. Ever since Dorian Munz died. I keep telling him he needs to go to the doctor, but you know how pilots can be. Need another towel?”

I shook my head no and asked her to tell me about Ray Sheen.

“I understand you know him pretty well.”

She looked at me hard. “Who told you that?”

“Your husband.”

Crissy calmly lowered herself onto the mauve cushion of a chaise lounge. If she was caught off-guard by my question, she covered it well.

“We’ve socialized a few times. Dinner, banquets, that sort of thing. Ray works for Greg Castle, and Hub and Greg are good friends, obviously. Beyond that… Why do you ask?”

“Ray tried to kill me last night.”

“Ray Sheen tried to kill you?” She scoffed like she didn’t believe me. “Why in the world would he do that?”

“I’ll let you know when I find out.”

I slipped inside the house and headed for the front door. Ryder was wrapped in a towel, sitting on the living room couch, absorbed in a laptop computer game with her grandfather. Hub was still drinking.

“I need to turn in my rental car.”

“Send me the bill,” Walker said. “We’ll call it even.”

I said I would and mentioned nothing about the bullet holes in the Escalade’s roof. I was just glad I wasn’t paying.

“Take care, Colonel.”

“You do the same, Mr. Logan.”

Across the street, a red Marine Corps flag flapped in the breeze from a flagpole in Major Kilgore’s front yard. The major was rocking in his porch swing, eyeballing Hub Walker’s elegant home with clear malice.

* * *

Having been abducted and stripped of various personal possessions, including a cell phone, afforded me an excellent opportunity to visit my friendly cellular service provider. My personal communications “advisor,” an earnest young man named Seth, explained megabytes and the differences between central processing units as if we shared a like-minded fascination with telecommunications minutiae, then tried to sell me a $600 smartphone. I explained to him as diplomatically as I could that unless the phone could beam me up and came equipped with a death ray to kill Klingons, I wasn’t interested in blowing nearly that much on any phone. I walked out fifteen minutes later with a bare-bones, seventy-five-dollar unit that was anything but smart. At least I didn’t have to enroll in grad school to figure out how the damn thing worked. Plus, they let me keep my old number.

Sitting in the parking lot, I plugged my new phone into the Escalade’s USB power port, called the central switchboard at Mercy Hospital in Rancho Bonita, and asked to be patched through to the intensive care unit. I told the woman who answered, who I assumed was a nurse, that I was calling to see how Mrs. Schmulowitz was doing.

“Are you family?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry. Unless you’re a spouse, domestic partner, or immediate family member, we’re prohibited by hospital policy from divulging any patient information.”

“Actually,” I said, “we’re married. In a technical sense.”

“Huh?”

I explained that Mrs. Schmulowitz and I shared the same address. As such, any good lawyer (an oxymoron if there ever was one) would argue that we lived together. And that made her my common-law wife. Which made it perfectly permissible, I told the nurse, to be briefed on her condition.

“Sir, I really don’t have time to play games.”

“OK, look, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m just her tenant. But Mrs. Schmulowitz is more than my landlady. She’s my inspiration. Hell, she may be the best person I’ve ever known. All I need is a word. Just one word. Critical? Stable? What? I don’t think that’s too much to ask, do you?”

The nurse sighed, tired of my badgering. “Mrs. Schmulowitz is in serious condition. We’d upgrade her to stable, but she insists on getting out of bed every hour to do leg-lifts.”

I thanked her and signed off, feeling as if one large rock had been lifted from me. Whatever lightness of being I felt lasted about as long as it took for my new, less-than-smart phone to ring. It was Savannah.

“You said you were going to call me.”

“True.”

“I waited, Logan, all night. Then I tried calling you. Because I was worried. Any idea how many times I tried calling? Go on, take a shot at it.”

“Many?”

“I stopped counting.”

“My phone died, Savannah. I had to get a new one.”

Was it the whole truth? No. But being a Buddhist is all about not hurting others. Telling Savannah all I’d been through in the past twenty-four hours would’ve only inflicted pain.

“I’m sorry you were scared, Savannah. I’m fine. I promise.”

She exhaled. “OK, apology accepted.” There was a pause, then she said, “I just miss you, that’s all.”

“I miss you, too, babe.”

There was a pause.

“You haven’t called me that in a long time,” Savannah said.

“What?”

“Babe.”

“It just sort of slipped out. Again, my apologies.”

“Don’t apologize. I like it.”

So much I wanted to tell her. That I ached for her. That I could do a better job, be a more thoughtful human being next time around. But I held back. The next step toward reconciliation was unconditional forgiveness. I was still working on that one.

“I talked to the hospital. Looks like Mrs. Schmulowitz is gonna make it.”

“That’s wonderful, Logan. She’s one of a kind. I hope your cat comes home, too. I know how much he means to you.”

“Why he does is beyond me.”

“I think it’s because you admire his sense of independence.”

“It’s not because of his selflessness, that’s for sure. It’s Kiddiot’s world. We just live in it.”

Savannah laughed. What I needed, she said, was a visit from The Cat Communicator, the reality television show Crissy Walker was hoping to produce at Animal Planet.

“My new client actually works at Animal Planet,” she said. “He’s having panic attacks over picking which shows to produce. He gets pitched hundreds of ideas every week.”

“I can see it now: the guy sits in climate-controlled comfort all day, sipping lattes and having people beg him to make their shows, then wigs out because he can’t decide between Monkeys Gone Wild and The Real Rodents of Orange County? I’m glad he’s not taking flying lessons. I don’t think he’d do very well.”

“Just because you’ve never had a panic attack, Logan, doesn’t mean they’re not real. They can be terribly debilitating.”

Only a minute earlier, I’d vowed to be a more empathetic human being. Now here I was, the same old insensitive me. Bad habits die hard.

“I’m sure your counseling will help him immeasurably.”

“You’re just saying that to placate me.”

“You know me better than that, Savannah.”

She blew air through her lips, flapping them. “What am I going to do with you, Logan?”

“I can think of a few things.”

The phone made a funny beep in my ear. I ignored it. Savannah didn’t.

“You have another call coming in,” she said.

“I don’t have call waiting.”

“Yes, Logan, you do, because that beep’s definitely call waiting. Could be important. I’ll let you go.”

I reluctantly admitted that I was “unfamiliar” with how call waiting worked on my new phone – or any phone, for that matter.

“You can fly the wings off anything ever built but you can’t figure out call waiting?”

“If I were dyslexic, Savannah, would you make fun of that?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why belittle a man who’s cellularly challenged?”

“You’re right. That was incredibly insensitive. You’ll have to forgive me.”

“I’m working on it.”

She told me which buttons to push on my new phone to toggle between calls. I pressed a button, promptly disconnecting her along with whoever else was trying to reach me. The phone rang almost immediately. It was Detective Rosario.

“One of our patrol units located that pickup truck you were looking for,” she said, “the one registered to C.W. Lazarus. We also located Mr. Lazarus.”

I’d fantasized about finding the son of a bitch myself, forcing a confession from him, then enacting with my fists the damage he’d done to the Ruptured Duck. But that wasn’t going to happen now. Life, I reminded myself, is full of disappointments.

“Did you ask him about my airplane? I’m hoping he spilled his guts.”

“That he did,” Rosario said. “But he won’t be talking about your airplane anytime soon, or anything else. C.W. Lazarus is dead.”

Twenty-three

Turkey vultures orbited high above Lazarus’s remains as Detective Rosario and I ascended the hill where his corpse lay under a broiling, late afternoon sun.

Mountain bikers had discovered the body a few hours earlier about a quarter-mile from a trailhead in the Cleveland National Forest where Lazarus’s Nissan pickup with its PCAFLR vanity license plates had also been found. The truck had been broken into and its radio stolen – not an uncommon occurrence these days among vehicles left unattended overnight in America’s majestic outback. Authorities surmised that garden variety vandals were likely responsible for the ransacking of Lazarus’s truck. As for the apparent murder of Lazarus himself, blame and explanation had not yet been apportioned.

“Ever wonder why vultures are bald?”

“Can’t say I have.” Rosario was breathing hard, trudging uphill. “But I don’t think it’s because Mother Nature decided that rockin’ a bald look would necessarily enhance their appearance.”

“No feathers means the gunk that clings to their heads dries faster and falls off quicker after they go Dumpster diving inside the body cavities of dead animals.”

“I could’ve gone the rest of my life without knowing that.”

Rosario stopped and bent at the waist, hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. I paused and waited for her. She was wearing lace-up hiking boots, faded Levis with her badge and pistol clipped to the waist, and a pink tank top that, without her shoulder rig obscuring it, revealed ample cleavage I hadn’t noticed before.

“You doing OK, Detective?”

She nodded. Sweat beads dripped from her short black hair onto the dirt. “I gotta start hitting the club more.”

The club. Before the days of computerized incline stair-steppers and cardio monitors, they were called “gyms,” unvarnished houses of pain where jocks and those who aspired to be jocks sweated, not preened. You went there to pump iron until your hands bled and your arms burned like magnesium. Nobody went looking to check out the local talent. I’d had my fill of gym workouts after four years of playing wide receiver for the Air Force Academy. Exercise for me these days consisted of a few tortured minutes every morning of stomach crunches and push-ups, followed by coffee and three ibuprofens. Call them whatever you wanted, health clubs or fitness centers, I’d no sooner join one than I would the Communist Party.

Rosario dug an inhaler out of her shoulder bag and sucked deeply. “Better now,” she said after a minute, standing erect and finger-combing her sopping hair. “Adult asthma. This getting older thing blows.”

“After the age of thirty, the body has a mind of its own.”

“You just make that up?”

I shook my head. “Bette Midler.”

“You don’t exactly strike me as the Divine Miss M type, Logan.”

“Are you kidding? I’m huge into musicals. Nothing finer in my opinion than a big Broadway production number.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“You’re right. I’m not. Musicals make my butt hurt after about ten minutes. I just remember random stuff. Pointless facts to know and tell.”

“Like why buzzards are bald.”

I smiled.

Rosario drew a deep breath and continued walking uphill while I fell in behind her. A half-mile or so below us, I could see the winding dirt road where I’d been arrested after escaping the clutches of Ray Sheen who, according to Rosario, was still on the lam.

I had persuaded her to let me look at Lazarus’s body, to stare down at the face of the man who’d caused me to crash my airplane. She’d turned me down at first, saying department policy prohibited unauthorized civilians from entering designated crime scenes. I countered by pointing out that the guy hadn’t tried to kill me; he’d tried to kill us.

“We survived a life-and-death experience,” I said. “That makes us brothers – or sisters – depending on how politically correct you want to get about it. I just want to look down at the dirt bag for a few seconds and gloat. Call it a catharsis.”

“What’s a catharsis?”

“It’s an arrangement. You let me have my little moment of satisfaction, I’ll spring for dinner afterward.”

The detective mulled my proposal, then said, “If anybody asks who you are or what you’re doing, you let me do the talking. You touch nothing, stand where I tell you, do what I tell you. Understood?”

“Roger.”

We made arrangements to meet in the parking lot of a church one block from the sheriff’s department’s Pine Valley substation, about forty highway miles east of downtown San Diego, just off Interstate 8. Rosario would then drive us to the scene, which was less than two miles from the substation. Her partner, she said, would not be coming along. Lawless’s wife was in labor. They were expecting twins.

No way was it a date with Rosario. Of that I convinced myself. My having asked the detective out to dinner was nothing more than reimbursement for a favor asked and granted. And even if it was a date, what Savannah didn’t know would never hurt her. Still, as I hiked up the trail, staring at Rosario’s bottom, I couldn’t help feeling that I was somehow cheating on Savannah. A tart taste rose up behind my tongue and stayed there.

* * *

The body was draped with a yellow tarp and surrounded by yellow crime scene tape looped in a loose circle around creosote bushes on either side of the trail. A pair of uniformed deputies, one African-American, the other white, guarded the scene, wiping sweat from their faces and sipping from plastic water bottles. They both looked bored and overheated. On the slope twenty meters above them, a ponytailed civilian in a green windbreaker with “SDSD Crime Lab” printed on the back was sweeping over the mountainous terrain with a metal detector, searching for what I assumed were spent bullets.

“What’s the story on the ME, Alicia?” the African-American deputy asked Rosario as we approached. “We’ve been here since before lunch.”

“Medical examiner’s swamped,” Rosario said. “Murder-suicide in Carlsbad, and the trolley splattered some transient down in Chula Vista. They said they’ll get somebody up here as soon as they can. Shouldn’t be much longer, fellas.”

Per protocol, the body was to remain untouched until a representative from the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s office arrived to declare the victim officially dead. They would then determine the approximate time of death by making a small cut with a pocket knife and jabbing a meat thermometer into the deceased’s liver.

Human beings begin losing heat at a rate of about one and one-half degrees Fahrenheit per hour as soon as they die. The warmer the weather, the slower they cool. Count down from 98.6, factor in ambient air temperatures, and you can get a reasonably accurate idea as to time of death. Rosario didn’t have to explain that part of it to me; I’d learned all about meat thermometers when I was with Alpha. More than once, we determined how many hours behind our intended targets we were by measuring the core temperatures of their dead compatriots, whom they often left behind to lighten their loads, in the vain hope of outrunning us.

“Who’s your friend?” the black deputy asked Rosario, dipping his chin in my direction.

“DA’s office,” Rosario said.

“Never seen him before.”

“He’s new.”

“He got a name?”

“He’s working undercover,” Rosario said.

“Gotta log him in, Alicia,” the white deputy said, pulling out a small spiral notebook from his back pocket. “You know the drill. Anybody who comes in or out of a crime scene—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Rosario said dismissively, “they gotta get logged in.” She looked over at me, drawing a blank. “What’s your name again?”

“Jake Gittes.”

The deputy wrote it down. I spelled it for him.

Rosario squatted beside the body and looked up at me.

“Ready to do this?”

I nodded.

She peeled back the tarp.

Lazarus was laying on his back, facing uphill, wearing a black dress shirt, untucked, his arms and legs splayed like he was making a snow angel. There was a baseball-size splotch of dried, rust-colored blood just below his diaphragm, and a hole the size of a dime in the center of the splotch. Half a button was missing where the bullet had nicked it before penetrating his torso.

“Entry wound?”

“That would be my guess,” Rosario said.

“So, whoever shot him, shot him more or less from face-on position.”

She nodded.

He was squinting and his jaws were parted. His lips were pulled back like he was grinning – and not one of those half-hearted grins, either, the kind you manage after enduring your father-in-law’s oft-repeated favorite joke about the rabbi who walks into a bar. We’re talking laugh your butt off like it’s 1999. Who knew death could be so funny?

“How do you know this guy’s Lazarus?”

“How do I know?” Rosario stood and pointed. “I know because his truck’s parked a quarter-mile down the trail. I also know because he matches the description of C.W. Lazarus on file at DMV. Hair, eye color, height, weight, and age. Everything. Who else is it gonna be?”

“You check his driver’s license?”

“The wallet’s probably in his back pocket. We can’t get to it. Not until the coroner shows up and signs off.”

“So, you haven’t run his fingerprints?”

“Like I said. Not until after the coroner’s investigator signs off.”

The corpse had dark, well-barbered hair and long flared sideburns. His left cheekbone bore a scar I recognized. It was shaped like the Nike corporate logo. A “swoosh.”

“His name’s not Lazarus,” I said, staring down at the man’s dead, laughing face. “His name’s Ray Sheen.”

Rosario blanched. “Ray Sheen, from Castle Robotics? You sure?”

I was.

From down the trail came the sound of somebody hacking up a lung. He trudged into view, pushing a rolling metal gurney upon which rested a folded green body bag and a brushed aluminum tool chest. He was a heavyset man in his late thirties with a shaved head, black polyester dress pants, and a short-sleeved white shirt, the tails of which refused to stay tucked. His forearms were a miasma of colorful tattoos. A digital camera was slung over his shoulder. His name tag identified him as “E. Schlosser.”

“They don’t pay me enough for this,” he said, wiping his soaking florid face.

“The Medical Examiner,” Rosario said, “has arrived.”

Schlosser’s first move was to de-tarp the body and snap about 200 photos. Then, wheezing, he got down on all fours, reached under the corpse, and extracted a red, eel-skin billfold, which he handed up to Rosario without being asked.

“At least we know it wasn’t a robbery,” Rosario said.

The uniform deputies both nodded.

She opened the wallet, pulled out a California driver’s license, studied it for a second, then held it up for my inspection.

The name on the license read, “Raymond Francis Sheen.” The photo matched the man with the distinctive scar on his left cheekbone who’d tried to murder me.

Swoosh, indeed.