Light Before Day (49 page)

"Don't worry about Everett," she said. "Or should I say Jim Clark? We caught up with him outside your apartment building last week. I almost lost a finger to that crazy bicycle chain he was wearing. Turns out Billy Hatfill had promised to send him back to the compound as long as he followed orders to kill you and Cale. Everett said those guys were the only family he ever had."

She bowed her head respectfully. "I felt sad for him," she whispered.

"Where is he now?" I asked.

She reached into her pocket and extended one closed fist in my direction. She dropped a chunky silver bicycle chain into my open palm. If there had been any blood on it when she tore it from the kid's neck, she had wiped it clean.

"He was sixteen," I whispered.

"Really?" she said. "He went for my throat like a man."

I wasn't surprised Everett had decided he was wrong not to kill me on Cale's yacht and had tried again. I had destroyed the place that must have felt like a fresh Eden for him. I realized that I was holding a murder weapon and pushed it into my front pocket.

The park was enfolded in night darkness. Caroline removed her sunglasses, and in the light from a nearby streetlight I could see that she was wearing contact lenses that darkened her unnervingly amber eyes to brown. She surveyed the urban landscape with the curiosity of a hunter. On the near horizon, the Sierra Tower apartment building rose fourteen stories against the twinkling hillside. Somewhere up there was the house in which Billy Hatfill had taken his life. I knew that it was for sale, but that buyers shied away.

"People always say bad shit about LA," she said. "It's nice here."

"This is West Hollywood," I said. "It's a different city."

"How long have you lived here?"

"A year."

"You plan on staying for a while?" she asked.

"I'm staying with friends," I said. She reached into the front pocket of her jeans and handed me a matchbook for a place called Atwell's Bar and Grill that had a Bakersfield address. I flipped it open and saw a strange series of numbers written on the inside flap.

"Since I know where you're going to be," she said quietly, "you can get me at that number."

My stare forced her to continue. "Claire Shipley lied. Reynaldo Reyez was alive when she got there that day. He's alive today."

I remembered how the old woman had told Caroline that grief made you forget the rules you used to play by, and how her words had formed a strange and sudden connection between the two of them.

"I told him everything you did," she said. "I told him we had to watch out for you. He said that's fine. He thinks you're a brave man. As for Corey, he said we are not the product of what is done to us—we are the product of our response to it. A little spiritual for an assassin, don't you think?"

"Corey never made contact with him?"

"No," she answered. "Claire made sure of that. When I told him what Corey had done, he wasn't pleased."

I noted her use of the old woman's first name as if she had become a friend. I had not doubted Claire Shipley's story for a second. I had believed that she had buried Reynaldo Reyez to keep Corey's attention on his dying grandmother.

"She raised him," I said. "She trained him."

Caroline gave me a faint smile and a nod. "She says an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

That's why she taught him to cut off their legs." A hard edge had crept into her voice. It sent a chill through me. "You going to keep that number, or are you going to throw it away as soon as I'm gone?" she asked. "If you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to need it."

I slid the matchbook in my front pocket and felt her lips brush against my cheek. When I looked up, she was already heading across the park. Her head was bowed and her shoulders were hunched as she merged with the shadows.

Later that night, Nate and I drove up Laurel Canyon beneath a sky cleared of its stars by the city's glare. I had dropped Everett's chain in a trash can on Santa Monica Boulevard, but the matchbook with Caroline's phone number was still in my pants pocket. It pressed against the inside of my thigh like a small finger, an invitation to violence and bloodshed like the kind that still tortured my sleep.

As we entered the backyard, I saw the door to Jimmy's office standing open, heard the cadence of his fingers flying across the keyboard. I clutched the matchbook advertising a place called Atwell's Bar and Grill in my fist and waited for him to notice my presence. He didn't, so I didn't tell him about my strange visit from a woman named Caroline Hughes. I wasn't sure if I would ever tell him.

According to Jimmy, my memory could drive me blind, so as I walked back toward the main house I took in every quiet detail as if it had been rendered by an artist who was desperate for my approval. In the guest bedroom, I found Nate sitting on the foot of the bed, his arms bent behind him, his breaths heavy and slightly strained, his lips parted and his brow furrowed in an expression of vulnerability that was surprising given his history.

"Can I stay?" he asked.

He arched his back beneath my weight and I tried to study every part of his body I touched as he wrapped his legs around my back and I accepted an invitation to assume a role with which I was not familiar. But when I parted his hairless thighs, my vision expanded to include a red-haired woman driving up a rutted mountain road beneath a canopy of fanned pine boughs. With a certainty I possess only in dreams, I knew that there were shadows awaiting her arrival at the road's end, and that as soon as she got there, they would step forward and repeat their promise to guide her through the pulsing radiance that continued to strobe her vision long after the flash of light before day that had stolen her mother.

Before Caroline Hughes could reach her destination, I pulled Nate's body against mine with the force of one arm and drove sounds out of him that lost all traces of human will or resistance. I whispered words in his ear that Corey McCormick could never have spoken to me.