The Blue Hour (16 page)

A few minutes later
he cornered the hostess against one of the empty tables and tried to ask some
questions about Ernest but she got away by leaning into a chair that slid away
with a bark and she disappeared into a door marked Employees Only. A moment
later a hefty young man came through the same door and glared at him.

Bill swept from the room, hands behind his back again
and head forward, imagining what it would feel like to pump a round into the
man's heart and watch the expression of disbelief on his stupid face. Watch
his eyes roll around like the last two olives in a jar.

• • •

Back up the freeway
then to more familiar ground, better hunting actually in the indoor malls where
women fearlessly wandered alone and were always so distracted by merchandise
you could hover about undetected and think anything you wanted about them. His
kit, shopping bag, bedsheet, the Deer Sleigh'R, Pandora's Box and three purses
were all back there, everything but the Deer Sleigh'r locked in two large metal
toolboxes. He'd imagined more than once just what a policeman would think if
he saw his things. But no officer could search his van without probable cause
and Bill was not about to offer them anything remotely like probable cause to
search his vehicle. He was clean. If pulled over routinely, or caught in a CHP
sobriety checkpoint, his fake CDL from the counterfeiter in Little Saigon was
a good one, descended from the high-quality false passports so indispensable in
the early days after the war.

But thank God for the
American Constitution's Bill of Rights, Bill mused, because without it, his
Deer Sleigh'R— advertised as "a great way to protect your trophy's meat
and hide from dirt and damage caused by rough, jagged ground"— would send
your average cop into fits of suspicion. The purses would sink him. And what
would they make of Pandora's Box, he thought: it was a prototype, unique and
one of a kind, just the sort of thing that would alarm a low-IQ policeman. An
explanation would be demanded.

He remembered that it was
about time to go see the box's maker again, get the thing repaired. It wouldn't
even turn on the last time he tried it. Like the battery was dead, or a fuse
blown or something. Luckily, he hadn't needed it. But the inventor could figure
it out and fix it—he'd created the damned thing in the first place.

So he drove through the
exhaust-fragrant night to a newly remodeled mall called the Main Place. He
cruised the lot once to get a feel for whether it was hot or cold. He liked the
Main Place because it was small and seemed kind of homey, for a mall. In order
to harvest he'd have to park safely away from the Main Place, in a construction
zone he'd scouted months earlier where he could make the transfer from car to
van. Where he parked the van was critical because it had to be safe for the
transfer but not too long a walk or bus ride to the parking lot.

But he wasn't in good
enough spirits to collect tonight. No. Tonight was a night for tasting, for
preparation, for inspiration. A night to be a scout, like the great Kit
Carson.

Bill spotted a very
attractive woman walking toward the Nordstrom entrance but her shorts and
T-shirt disappointed him. Summer was always a time when women dressed down, it
seemed, definitely harder to find one wearing good fashionable clothing.

The positive side was that
many liked to wear their hair up against the heat, and hair up always signified
to Bill breeding, class, education, sophistication and ungovernable carnal
appetites. But this one had her hair down and wore unflattering flat-soled
sandals and didn't even roll up the sleeves of her T-shirt to expose the
deliciousness of the upper female arm.

White trash, he thought:
common as sparrows and about as interesting.

A blond woman in a
red dress and red shoes: too flabby.

A lanky Negress: too
young.

A Central American woman:
rich and dark as coffee but what do you say to her?

A stubby little clerical
type with a hop in her step and a face like a frog: um, sorry, ma'am.

But then out of the blue
came a very interesting possibility, getting into her beat-up old sedan now,
so Bill brought his van to a stop behind her and off to one side as if wanting
her parking spot. She was tall with curly dark hair and an intelligent
forehead and shapely legs. Her skirt wasn't short except when she lowered
herself into the car, but her shoes were high enough and her blouse was rich
purple and sleeveless. She knew how beautiful her arms were. He imagined her
face captured by photography on her driver's license, and her physical
characteristics listed beside the picture, in plain black and white. It was
really something to have so many facts about a woman contained on a concise,
durable, stackable card. You never forgot a birthday. And there was more truth
on a CDL than most women would tell you in a lifetime.

He rolled down his window
to give her a good look at his handsomeness. He motioned her out when she
turned and looked through her window at him. She smiled and waved. Lovely
teeth.

She backed out her long,
boatlike American car and Big Bill waited, judging how well he would fit behind
her seat. She made the half turn and shifted into drive but now, rather than
nosing into her place, Bill backed his van into her path and all she could do
was wait and look up at him, imperially seated in his captain's chair. He was
proud of the new silver paint job he'd given his vehicle. He smiled down at her
and felt the cold white anger blooming inside him.

She rolled her window down
to just below her mouth. "Thanks for waiting," she said.

"You're very
welcome, ma'am."

"Well, thanks.
But now you're kind of in my way."

"I was just
wondering if you'd like to have a drink."

She was still smiling. He
couldn't believe it. In fact he didn't believe it because he knew how fast
things could change with a woman. In that second she measured him, he knew,
making difficult decisions faster than any computer, assessing his threat and
attractiveness, calculating his likely gifts and his potential dangers, judging
both the safety and the profitability of his company.

"Look," she
said. "I work here, at Goldsmith's Jewelry? Come in some night and say hi.
Maybe we could get coffee. I'm Ronnie."

"They call me
Bill."

"Cool! Nice to
meet you."

"Have a nice
evening, Ronnie."

He bowed his head in what
he thought of as an Old West manner, then eased his van forward and into the
place.

A moment later he looked
to see Ronnie's one-tail- lighted heap of a car wobble around a corner and out
of the lot. He wrote down her license plate number just in case she didn't work
at Goldsmith's Jewelry. Bill didn't mind research. Research was part of
scouting. And nothing on earth infuriated him more than being lied to by a
woman he trusted.

The parking spot turned
out to be a pretty good one— facing one of the main entrances, no cars in front
of it to obscure his view of the crosswalk. He cut the engine and sat back.
Ronnie's car vanished onto the boulevard. The only reason he could tell it was
hers was because of the broken light. What a smile. Bill felt a little stirring
down there south of the belt line.

Bill watched a
couple of teenage girls walk toward the entrance, but they didn't interest him.
He was a mature man with mature tastes. He believed that young people deserved
a chance, and who knew, maybe one of them would grow into a woman he could
enjoy someday. Bill then entertained himself with a recurring daydream: sailing
down the highway in a fast car with a couple of his girls in the back with
their hair blowing free, another in the front next to him with her hand on his
crotch. Tape player up loud, that Springsteen song where the guy wants to get
the electric chair with his girl on his lap. Heading for Vegas. Ninety miles an
hour and a vintage 9mm Luger under his thigh. Oh, really, officer? B-LAM!

It was pleasant enough to
imagine this, but a little absurd. He didn't like to gamble and he had no
desire to die at the hands of law enforcement. He didn't quite understand martyrdom
of any kind. There was no glamour in it.

He pivoted in his
captain's chair and stepped into the back of the van. He gloved up with fresh
latex and took out the purses by their straps, stashing them behind his seat.

He started up the van and
backed out of the spot. Out of the lot, down the boulevard where Ronnie had
gone—she was almost certainly a lying, scheming witch—then back onto the
freeway bound for the master-planned community of Irvine and the sanctuary of
his home.

He felt behind him and
brought out the purses, setting them all on the big console beside the driver's
station. Each had its own smell. He lifted and sniffed and enjoyed them one at
a time. His program hadn't been worked out for the first three—he didn't know
how to do what he wanted to do with them. He knew he had to keep something from
each of the women he loved—why bother if you just dumped them forever, treated
them like they didn't matter?

He tapped to the radio on
his steering wheel, wondering what he'd do if he could do anything in the world
he wanted to.

One thing he'd do was
develop that conscience. It seemed like life would be easier with such a thing.
He'd know the difference between right and wrong.

And if you knew, you could
easily pick the one that was best for you.

He'd also get that job at Saddleback's, the one
advertised on the sign in the window last week. The pay was decent, and he
would be surrounded by boots, hats, dusters, thick belts with enormous buckles
and genuine feed and tack. The place smelled of hay and leather. Either that,
or get a job as one of the costumed gunslingers at Knott's Berry Farm, blasting
away while women in bonnets admired his gunplay.

Big Bill remembered the
first time he actually saw John Wayne's house—former house, to be exact. It was
just over the hills there, on an island in Newport Harbor. He'd stood for
hours, contemplating it. And gone back a dozen times, at least. That had
naturally led to a dinner cruise aboard the Duke's former boat, Wild Goose. The
cruise had set him back $50 but Bill would never forget the majesty of the
enormous wooden bar where John Wayne had drank and gambled, the master
stateroom or the little berths set up for his kids. Standing on that ship while
it hummed around the harbor Bill had felt like he was stationed in the very
heart of the American West.

Now the West was mostly
suburbia, but that was okay, because the suburbs thrived on the illusion of
tranquillity.

Bill checked his speed and
thought of the old detective they'd brought back to catch the Purse
Snatcher—Hess was his name. He was in the papers this morning, a picture and
everything. He looked like an Old West sheriff, all the lines in his face and
those cold eyes. Obviously a man with a conscience.

Naturally, however, the
cop in charge of his case was a woman. She'd clucked on in the article about
what a privilege it was to work with the foul old investigator. In the
newspaper picture, she looked about half the age of her new partner. Bill liked
that idea: an old corpse of a guy and a perfectly preserved, young, fresh
woman, trying to catch a criminal genius.

Give them something to think about. He reached into
his shirt pocket, took out the folded paper and stuffed it into one of the
purses—his very first, actually, the brown-and- black one.

He
checked his mirror, then reached over, swung all three purses across his body
and dangled them out over the carpool lane. The wind ripped them from his hand.
He watched them in the sideview mirror, bouncing like heads along the asphalt.

"We got a hit from CAL-ID,
Hess," said Merci Rayborn. "Those must have been some damned good
parameters you and the witch doctor worked up."

She
couldn't control the excitement in her voice. "Creep named Lee LaLonde,
car thief, meth freak, nice healthy sheet—mostly Riverside County. Get this, he
lives out in Elsinore now, just off the Ortega. I let Riverside know we're
coming in. I'll pick you up in half an hour."

She could
hear a lamp click on, then the sound of the old man breathing. Her bedside
clock said 4:56.

"Get
some backup?" he asked in a calm, clear voice.

"No.
The shitbird is still on parole. We can do what we want with him. Don't
worry."

She felt
presumptuous telling a superior officer not to worry but Hess wasn't superior
anymore, she reminded herself. It made her feel powerful. The adrenaline was
jumping through her now and she couldn't stop it if she wanted to. She didn't
want to.

This was
what it was all about, life made vivid and death made close by force of arms.
It was better than being in love.

He gave
her directions to his apartment, told her he'd be out front, and hung up.

Merci had
already hit the coffee maker, which she set up before bed each night in case
something like this broke. Hot cup now in hand, heart pounding good and solid
but not too fast, she went back to the bedroom where she turned the radio on
her dresser to the news and the radio in the bathroom to a rock station.