the Forgotten Man (2005) (10 page)

"Call me tomorrow morning or it goes to the cops."

"Fuck you, you asshole! Fuck Faustina, too!"

I stopped, and turned hack to him when he said it. His face paled, and his rage became something soft.

I said, "What?"

He shook his head.

I let myself out, pulled the door shut, and stood on the porch. Pike was in the street, his sunglasses reflecting red like nighttime cat eyes. Inside, Marsha called Stephen Golden to dinner.

Chapter 14

A gentle onshore breeze carried the smell and the taste from the sea, six blocks away. A thin maritime fog swirled overhead, bright with reflected light. The fog dampened neighborhood sounds, and left the world feeling empty. Pike watched me approach. When I reached him, we were in the street, two guys just waiting. We had no reason to wait, but something felt unfinished. I stared at Golden's house, wondering if I had forgotten an obvious question or an even more obvious conclusion. When I looked at Pike again, he was still watching me."I saw how you looked at him. A couple of times in there when he said things."

"What do you mean?"

"Are you all right with this?"

I glanced back at the house, but its face hadn't changed. It was a house. I didn't know if I was all right or not. I tried to explain.

"I work a case for other people. It's always about someone else. This time, too; Faustina is a stranger - but it ended up feeling like I was here about me. I wasn't sure what to ask. None of it seemed as clear."

I thought about it.

"I guess."

We stood in the street. Out on Main, a horn blew. A dog barked as if fighting for its life, and then the barking abruptly stopped. I smelled garlic.

After a while, Pike said, "You did fine."

We walked back up the street to his Jeep, then made the long drive back to my house, bumping along in traffic like a million other Angelenos, but the sense that my night's work was unfinished remained. We left the 405 at Mulholland and drove east along the spine of the mountains, neither of us speaking. The fields of light on either side of us that marked the city and the valley did not glitter that night. They were hidden behind lowering clouds. The stalled spring rain had thinned throughout the day, but now was returning.

When we reached my house, Pike let me out at the mouth of my carport. He spoke for the first time since we had left Venice.

He said, "It was the word, sad. Sad has an ugly weight."

I knew right away what he was saying, and knew he was right.

"Yes. It was when Golden said Faustina seemed sad. He wasn't just a stiff on a slab anymore. He was real, and what he felt was real. You're right about that word."

"You want to go grab a beer or something?"

"No, I'm good," I said.

"We could go back to Golden's. Put two in his head for using that word."

"Let's quit while we're ahead."

I got out, closed his door, but didn't watch Pike drive away.

My house was quiet, and empty. For the first time that day, I thought about Lucy. I wanted to hear her voice. I wanted to say something funny, and be rewarded with her laugh. I wanted to tell her about Herbert Faustina, and let her help me carry the weight of that word - sad. I wanted everything to be as it had been between us because if only I had her then maybe this business about Faustina wouldn't feel so important.

But Lucy and Ben weren't inside and they weren't down the hill in their apartment. They were two thousand miles away, building a new life.

I checked the phone, but no one had left a message. I washed my hands, took a Falstaff from the fridge, then put out fresh food for the cat. I called him.

"Hey, buddy. You here?"

I opened the French doors to the deck and called him again, but he did not appear.

I leaned against the kitchen counter. The phone was three feet away. I went into the living room and turned on the tube. Maybe the Red Light Assassin had racked up another score. I went back to the phone, dialed most of Lucy's number, then stopped, not because I was scared but because I didn't want her to hurt and that was the way she wanted it. It should have been easy; just stop pretending that she wanted to hear my voice as much as I wanted to hear hers.

After a while, I opened another Falstaff, then decided to take care of the unfinished business.

Carol Starkey It was almost ten that night when Starkey idled past Elvis Cole's house, trying to work up the nerve to stop. His car was in its usual place, his house was lit, and her palms were as damp as the first time she faced down a bomb when she was a rookie tech with LAPD's Bomb Squad.

Starkey, pissed at herself, said, "Jesus Christ, moron, just stop for Christ's sake. He's home. You drove all the way up here."

The entire drive up from Mar Vista, Starkey had badgered herself as to what she would do and how she would do it: She would knock on his door, bring him over to the couch, and sit his ass down. She was gonna say, Hey, listen to me, I'm being serious - I like you and I think you think I'm cool, too, so let's stop pretending we're only friends and act like adults, okay? - and then she would kiss him and hope to hell he didn't toss her out on her ass.

Starkey said, "All you gotta do is stop, go to the door, and do it."

Starkey didn't stop. She crept past his house on the crappy little road, turned around in a gravel drive, then eased back with her lights off like some kind of lunatic stalker pervert, talking to herself the entire time because - her shrink said - hearing another human voice was better than hearing no voice at all, even if it was your own.

Touchy-feely bullshit.

Starkey parked up the street from Cole's house so she could keep an eye on things while she got herself together. If he came out he probably wouldn't recognize her car. Jesus, if Cole caught her sitting out here she would drive right off the cliff, no shit, just flat out punch the gas and pull a hard left straight down to the center of the earth and never come back.

"Cole," she said. "You must be the densest man in Los Angeles and I am certainly the most pathetic female, so why can't we just get on with this?"

Starkey felt around for her cigarettes and was disgusted to find she had only eight or nine left. They wouldn't last long. She lit one, sucked down half with one ferociously hot pull, then exhaled through her nose, feeling grumpy and frustrated. Here she was, a tough-ass bomb cop who had de-armed, defused, and defeated more than enough bombs to blow Cole's house right off the mountain, who had, herself, been blown apart in a goddamned trailer park, come back to tell about it, then gone on to beat and bury the most notorious serial bomber in U. S. history (that asshole, Mr. Red, who had blown up her house in the process, that prick!), and she couldn't work up the nut to bang on Cole's door. And then bang him.

It wasn't for lack of trying. Starkey had asked Cole out, flirted with him shamelessly, and pretty much done everything short of putting a gun to his head. But Cole, that idiot, had it bad for his lawyer, the Southern Belle.

Starkey scowled as if she had bitten a turd.

"Looo-ceee."

Every time she thought about Lucy Chenier, she pictured Lucille Ball, all that wild red hair, bulging eyes, and loony bullshit with Ethel Mertz. She could hear Ricky's voice.

"Looo-ceee, I hooaaammm!"

How could Cole say her name without laughing?

Starkey finished the cigarette, tossed it, then lit another. Starkey wasn't short on nerve, but her stupid shrink had suggested she wasn't so much afraid of Cole's rejection as she was of eventually losing him. Starkey hadn't had the best of luck when it came to men. Not so many years ago she was head over heels in solid with her sergeant-supervisor on the Bomb Squad, Sugar Boudreaux, who still left her shaking when she thought about him, but Sugar had been killed with her in the trailer park. Then there was Jack Pell, the ATF agent she met on the hunt for Mr. Red. Starkey had been hitting the booze pretty good back then, and she was coming off Sugar and the effed-up ripped-apart surgical nightmare that was her patched-together body. One third of her right breast - missing in action; one fourth of her stomach - gone; three feet of intestine - adios; her spleen - what spleen?; and the Big Casino - her uterus ... and everything that went with it. Pell had been tender, and his passionate mercies had gone a long way toward helping her kick the booze, but after a while they both realized it wasn't The Love, Pell with his own uncertainties and Starkey with hers, both of them with so far yet to go.

"Love'm and lose'm."

And maybe that was her fear - if she had Cole then she would lose him, just as she lost Sugar and Pell - so it was safer to simply want him.

Psychobabble bullshit.

Starkey lit another cigarette, then slouched down in the seat, watching his house. She had liked Elvis Cole since they met on the night the little boy went missing. She liked his dopey sense of humor and the fierce way he tried to be normal even though he wasn't; she liked how he had given every part of himself to find that boy, and the loyalty she saw in his friends -

Starkey grinned.

-and it didn't hurt he had a hot ass, either.

Starkey's laughter faded, and the hole it left filled with sadness. Truth be told, she had a crush on him, she was fascinated by him, she dwelled on him, and she wanted him to want her as much as she wanted him.

Maybe he didn't like her.

Maybe she wasn't his type.

He was still in love with Lucy Chenier.

Starkey let smoke drift from her mouth, up and over her face like a cloud, hiding her. She hadn't taken a drink in ten months. She wouldn't start now.

All she had to do was go to his door and knock.

"Do it!"

Starkey pushed herself upright, flicked the cigarette away, then started her car as -

Thirty yards away in his carport, brake lights came on and the grungy yellow Corvette backed out.

Starkey said, "Shit!"

She ducked, praying to Christ he didn't see her as the Corvette's tail swung around. She wedged herself all the way down on the seat, damn near under the wheel, and when she finally looked up he was gone.

Chapter 15

The Missing " F ather? Father, are you here?"

"I'm coming, dear."

Father Clarence Wills - called Father Willie by the patrons of Our Lady of Righteous Forgiveness Church - hoisted his creaky bones up from the floor of his closet and stepped into his office. Mrs. Hansen, who assisted him in his clerical duties, was waiting in the door with her purse and jacket.

He said, "I was just trying to get those papers away. Why is it all the empty file space is at the bottom of these old cabinets?"

"You're limping."

"I'm always limping. It comes with age and too much port wine."

Father Willie loved telling her things like that. Every time, she would cluck at him just as she did now, and, every time, he would smile, letting her know it was all just a naughty tease. Mrs. Hansen was short, overweight, and probably the only person in town shorter, fatter, and older than Father Willie.

"It's dark out, Father. I'd like to be getting home."

"That's fine, dear. We're finished for the day."

"I don't like leaving after dark. It's not safe out in the night."

"You could have gone two hours ago."

"You were still working."

"And I'll work after you leave. Just a few more things. Here, I'll see you out to your car."

She clucked again as he pulled on his jacket. The thin air was growing nippy.

"You big men think I'm silly, but something happened to all those people and it always happened at night. Javier is the same way, making fun of me like it's all in my head."

Javier Hansen was her husband. Between them, Mr. and Mrs. Hansen had five children, sixteen grandchildren, and two greatgrandchildren, every one of them "corn-fed and farm-raised" as her husband liked to say, and all of them currently living somewhere else.

"I'm not making fun, dear, but that was years ago and there was never any fact to go with the rumors. People get carried away with these things, and then start believing in werewolves."

"Six people don't just up and vanish."

"Six people spread over twenty years. Wives leave their husbands, husbands leave wives, children run away, people move on."

"People say something when they move, good-bye or good riddance. They pay their bills and close their accounts-they don't just disappear like they were snatched off the face of the earth. Those children didn't just leave."

Mrs. Hansen had worked herself up into a snit, though Father Willie had to agree about the children. Three of the six missing were minor children, the two little Ames girls and that Brentworth boy, gone missing in the span of eight months almost ten years ago. They hadn't just moved on like the adults might have, not those little girls and the boy. That was a clear-cut crime, no doubt about it, though the police had never been able to prove it or even name a suspect.

Father Willie felt glum at the memory, and suddenly got it in his head to tease Mrs. Hansen out of her snit.