Strip Search (23 page)

Wager, still clinging to the thin steel of the viaduct’s leg, stared numbly into the silent street. Slowly, he reholstered his unfired pistol and felt his breath settle into something like normal gasps. And the almost irrelevant thought crossed his mind, that it was good he had not had time to fire a round—that there was a lot of paperwork every time a cop fired a bullet. That the Bulldog would want to know exactly what Wager was doing all by himself on this case and why he was idiot enough to walk into an obvious trap.

Wager would not have been able to answer him.

He seated himself at the far end of the counter in an all-night restaurant and let his eyes study the fake cowboy decor. He had been in here a hundred times, but now it was as if he saw it all anew. It did not make it any more attractive—just new. Like the pressure of the counter stool under him, and the almost sweet smell of brewing coffee, and the quiet murmur of voices from the room crowded with night people. All that was new, too. The wallpaper was tan with brand markings scattered over it, and the menus had happy cowgirls twitching buckskin fringes beneath the restaurant’s name: Howdy from Cowboy Bob’s 24-Hour Chuck Wagons. The round stools and the seats in the filled booths were covered in imitation piebald calfskin; the waitress, her face expressing her weary feet, wore a green uniform that was out of place, but which Wager had never noticed before. Her baggy eyes, from across a new distance, frowned at something on Wager’s face, and her hand went to her own cheek.

“You been in a fight?”

“Why?” His voice, too, sounded new and distant in his own ears.

“You got a cut or a burn or something. Right there.”

Wager’s fingers touched a numbed welt. It seemed to grow as he brushed his fingertips along it, and, under their pressure, a stinging ache began. “Bring me some coffee—black. I’ll be back in a minute.”

The bathroom mirror showed a hot, red welt angling up across his cheekbone. It didn’t look as big as his fingers had told him, but it was big enough—and far closer than he wanted to come to any bullet. He stared at the mark for a long, meditative minute before soaking a paper towel in cold water and pressing it to his flesh. He wasn’t scared; maybe fright would come later. He still had nightmares about the first time he had been shot at, so long ago, but the later times had faded into half-comic war stories and now they seemed as if they had happened to someone else. Right now the someone else seemed to be staring back at him out of the mirror, and he felt the same numb distance from that self-image that he had felt from the waitress.

He lifted the towel and looked for a trace of blood, but saw none. There was a little luck in that. The big luck was that the killer had missed. All those bullets—it must have been a semi-automatic—and this close, and the guy had missed. The silencer. The clumsy weight and balance of an extra couple inches of steel on the end of the barrel.

He pressed another wet towel to the welt, satisfied that it did not seem to grow any bigger as he watched. Nor any smaller. He’d have to come up with some story for the people at work. Cut himself shaving … A night of passion …

Strange how a cop could develop a curiously mixed sense of his own vulnerability. How, sometimes, he could, as the little brass sign on Sergeant Brozki’s desk boasted, walk through the valley of the shadow and fear no evil because he was the meanest son of a bitch in the valley. And at other times, feel as if the cross hairs of a rifle were centered on his back, and a finger was pulling the trigger….

Earlier, as he’d driven out east on Colfax, he had felt curiously invulnerable, cushioned by his nostalgia from the awareness of what might happen to any cop at any time. When he thought back, he could recognize that divided consciousness when he’d answered the telephone, one part of him agreeing with sleepy carelessness to meet the voice, the other trying to wake him to the possibility of real danger. But he had been in his invulnerable phase; he had happily bullied a Vietnamese bartender; he knew that nothing would happen to him and not just because he was a cop but because he was Gabriel Villanueva Wager, who could take chances and pay no price.

“You all right? You cold?”

He blinked and focused on the waitress, whose baggy eyes looked at him with concern.

“You’re shaking,” she said. “You got a fever?”

“No.” He looked down at the coffee cup in his hand, uncertain how he got back to the counter and to his seat. “Nerves,” he said. “Too much coffee.”

“Well, here,” she lifted the saucer and wiped the counter with a sponge. “Let me get you some decaf. You drink that much coffee and you’re gonna get sick.”

Wager shook his head. “That’s okay—I don’t want anymore.” He set the cup down as cautiously as he could, clattering it briefly before his cramped fingers could clear the handle. Sucking in a deep breath, he forced his shoulders down and forward, stretching the clenched muscles at the base of his neck and feeling them drain of tautness and strain. Golding had shown him that trick, taken from one of the earlier fads the man had followed in his journey to spiritual oneness with whatever. But even a stopped clock was right twice a day, and Golding’s little exercise worked. Stretching again, Wager felt the muscles slack, felt his breath and pulse slow, his trembling flesh settle into relaxed suppleness.

He had been terrified. When the car swung in to nail him, he had been too startled and frightened to fight back against the surprise of those searing headlights. And when his feet, ungoverned by his mind, had fled, terror had gripped his soul as deeply as any time in Vietnam, when he had huddled helpless and totally isolated beneath the quivering timbers and leaking sandbags, the churning thunder of rockets and mortars that had made living only a matter of luck and death only a matter of time. Only twenty minutes ago, he, Gabriel Villanueva Wager, had been so mindlessly terrified that he had run. It was something you could—after a while—admit. Maybe it was something you could even live with. But he had to wonder if it was something he could work with. He had to wonder if the next time—and there was bound to be a next time—he would suffer the paralysis of terror. Or would he explode mindlessly, in fear of that paralysis? He had to wonder if he could still govern his own flesh.

Wager covered the chit with a bill and went into the cool, welcome darkness where his familiar Trans Am waited. He wasn’t immune; he wasn’t chosen; he wasn’t special. He was blind to danger, or sleepy, or just careless. That happened, but it couldn’t happen too often. He was not immune, and he’d better not be careless, because the slayer of three people was now after him. All because he was looking for a man with white hair.
Thoonk.

M
AYBE IT WAS
the bags under his eyes; maybe it was the taut and growing anger that had replaced last night’s shock and the preceding inexplicable depression over Doc’s death. Maybe it was just the smell of a long, bad night on his breath; but no one at work—not even Max—asked about the streak of raised and burned flesh along his cheek. He caught his partner eyeing it a couple times, and once he seemed ready to say something. But Wager, carefully setting the pile of reports and court depositions squarely on his desk, looked flatly into the man’s blue eyes and said, “Nice day, isn’t it?” Max could take a hint.

Now, after a solid sleep that spanned the late afternoon and early evening and left the hinges of his jaw aching from the weight of his motionless head against the hard mattress, Wager steamed his flesh awake in a hot shower. By the time he finished dressing, the red numbers of his clock said 11:42. He squared the wide-brimmed hat low over his eyes and checked himself one last time in the mirror. The Taco Kid rides again. The scruffy, unshaven figure looked back with a tight smile that never made it to the eyes—so much for that day’s ration of humor.

Fifteen minutes later, he swam among the crowds of the midnight streets.

“Pssst—want a hit?” The mutter came from a shiny-eyed blond girl who may have been sixteen; her bangs and straight hair framed her face to make it look younger, and she smiled widely at him and glided past in a haze of cloudy excitement. She disappeared beyond the shoulders of a pair of homosexuals walking with their hands in each other’s hip pockets. They whispered something and giggled. A shirtless kid in ragged, filthy jeans asked him for his change, snarling “Fuck you” when Wager shoved past his upturned palm. A young couple pushed a baby stroller and held hands and smiled vacantly at the motion and noise. They paused to deal for a joint held up by a bearded man who leaned with one thin leg cocked back against the photograph-covered wall of an adult-movie arcade. He grinned down at the baby. “Aw, that’s a cute kid—I had a kid like that once. Can he have a sip of my beer? Kids love beer.” On the corner, his sequined shirt sparking light from the passing headlights, a pimp talked to two girls with worn backpacks and wide eyes. He smiled whitely and laughed, then shook his head and pointed toward a coffee shop, his arm snaking around the taller one’s waist. “Hey, man, you looking?” A boy caught Wager’s attention and gave his bleached hair a carefree toss; but his eyes held anxious hunger as they tried to read him. “You want it, I got it. If I don’t have it, I know who does. You looking, man?” A light hand rested on his arm, “Come on, honey, you’re too macho for boys,” said the unseen voice, while a tired youth with a beatific gaze and gunnysack robe handed out ink-smeared fliers which promised that Jesus would forgive anything and save anyone. The crowd, like a school of minnows, suddenly parted as two policemen strolled down the middle of the sidewalk in their own little capsule of space and eyed Wager suspiciously.

He swung wide around the span of sidewalk claimed by LaBelle Brown and saw her, white purse swinging saucily against her pink dress, as she paced the curb, eyes challenging the slowly passing cars. Making his way through the crowds, he reached the light-filled entry of the Cinnamon Club and paused a moment in the haze of cigarette smoke that rolled like a pale fog out of the doorway.

“Hi, there’s a seat over here.” A girl whose dark curls cupped her breasts smiled and started to lead him to a corner.

“I’m looking for Little Ray. Is he here tonight?”

“I don’t know him. My name’s Emma. You ready for a drink?”

She put him at one of the tiny tables almost against the back wall. On the ramp, glistening in the red lights as if her flesh were oiled, a girl finished her third number. She had tightly curled blond hair down to her shoulders and an amazingly round and active rear end. The music roared to a pulsating climax and on the last note the girl froze, pressing her fingertips against the ceiling and sucking in her stomach to accentuate her pointed breasts and arcing posterior as the disc jockey, voice hoarse in the microphone, yelled enthusiastically, “All right—let’s hear it for Fanny Hill!” The girl smiled at the shouts and applause and modestly knelt to pick up the bills on the runway as the music shifted to a slower tempo. Wager searched the silhouettes for Little Ray’s clutch of hair.

With his third beer, Wager’s head began to throb from the stuffy air and the ceaseless impact of noise. Finally, close to one, the man came in, and Wager didn’t let him get as far as a table.

“Let’s step out back, Little Ray—I got some questions.”

“Hey, man, where the hell you been? I thought we had a deal going.”

“Maybe we do, maybe we don’t—maybe somebody screwed something up.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Let’s go out back and talk.”

“I got some business first, man. This is my office call, you know?”

“They’ll wait. It won’t take long.”

The hardness in Wager’s voice worried the man. “What’s the problem?”

“Somebody set me up,” said Wager. “I want to know who and why.”

“Hey, now—I don’t know nothing about any setup!”

Wager nudged the man’s arm toward the rear exit. “That’s what I want you to tell me, Little Ray: how much you don’t know about it.”

They stood in the cool air and pale glow of the parking lot behind the club. Every slot was filled with late-model cars and Wager counted four Datson ZXs, each with a slightly different flash of racing stripes. Some salesman had offered the girls a group discount.

“What kind of setup, man? What are you laying on me?”

“Somebody tried to waste me. I figure it’s somebody who heard you shooting off your mouth about our deal.”

Little Ray’s eyes gave him away. “No, man—I ain’t said nothing to nobody!”

“Bullshit. It’s all over the street. You’re claiming you’re the next capo di capo or some shit.”

“No—now, listen—”

“You listen, asshole; my associates, they don’t like people talking about their business. ‘Discretion’—you know what that means? It means you keep your mouth shut when you do business with me or anybody I speak for. You got that?”

“Yeah, sure, but I—”

“I heard you been shooting off your mouth. I heard it from people I respect. And something else, Little Ray; somebody you talked to tied it to me. And they went after me. It was very close, Little Ray.” Wager shoved the barrel of his Star PD under the man’s chin and hooked a roll of pale, trembling flesh over the muzzle. “And if I get even a hint that you had a part of it, you are a dead man, Little Ray.”

“I didn’t! I mean, I might have said something to a friend or something about a big deal coming down. I mean, who wouldn’t—it’s really big, you know? But, man, I did not—I did not!—set you up or finger you to nobody!”

Wager stared into the man’s eyes and let the silence and the barrel of the gun work for him.

Little Ray’s chin waggled back and forth like a ball on the end of a stick. “I swear! I don’t even know your name, man!”

“I want you to find out who it was.”

“What?”

“You’re supposed to know the street—that’s part of our deal. So show me how well you know it—you find out who tried to do a number on me.”

“Hey, man, that’s not the kind of contacts—”

“Find out, Little Ray. I will see you right here tomorrow at the same time, and you will prove to me you had nothing to do with it.”