Tropical Depression (21 page)

Tanner didn’t come out until after six. The guy was starting to annoy me: he worked straight through lunch and then stayed late, too. There was such a thing as too much devotion to duty.

I followed him home through the miserable, honking, crawling, tire-biting traffic and watched from a half-block away as he went in the front door. I thought I could hear somebody shouting, “Daddy!” but maybe I imagined it.

And that was it. I sat there until almost midnight and there were no muffled gunshots, no burning crosses, no unusual hole-digging—nothing. Tanner went in. It got dark and the lights came on. The purple glow of television filled the front window. The purple glow went out. The lights went out.

I had plenty of time to think about all kinds of things. I thought about Darryl Strawberry’s back problems. I thought about the Burrito King down on Eagle Rock Boulevard. I thought about that voice yelling “Daddy” when Tanner went in the house. That took me in directions I didn’t want to go. But I thought about it for a while anyway.

At 11:47 the last light went out. I waited a few more minutes to be sure Tanner didn’t sneak out wrapped in a Nazi flag. Then I started the car and left.

I drove slowly down to Eagle Rock Boulevard and found the Burrito King. I had two beef burritos and a bottle of Corona from the liquor store next door. I barely made it back to the hotel, where I fell onto the bed and slept the night through.

I overslept the next morning. I hadn’t left a wake-up call but I still felt guilty and stupid about sleeping so late. I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower without running. I felt like a weight was hanging from the back of my head and a family of mice was camping out in my mouth.

It was nearly nine o’clock when I got downstairs to the coffee shop. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I ordered French toast. I took the first bite, and all I could think was that if I walked back into the kitchen I could finally discover how yesterday’s doughnuts had been made.

I decided I wasn’t hungry anyway. I drank my water and left the sugar-heaped, fat-fried cardboard on my plate. I went back up to my room.

I was already having the kind of morning where you can’t figure out why you bother. It must be blood sugar. Or maybe it was geographical. Whatever it was, I sat on my bed for a half hour or so and tried to figure out what I should do and why.

The whole shape of the day was just adding to the feeling of stupid futility I had about tailing Tanner yesterday. One day of surveillance doesn’t generally tell you anything, but my gut was insisting that Tanner was exactly what he seemed: a hardworking, ordinary family man. Clean, decent, God-fearing—he probably had season tickets for a local church.

He was a typical police administrator, no more. He had the swivel-chair spread to prove it. I had watched him all day, and the idea of this agreeable family man flinging Spider off the roof with one hand was laughable.

That’s what my gut said. But Tanner could have had help. He might be the point man for a racist conspiracy. And listening to my gut made me think I was wimping out, whining about futility when I should just stick with it, no matter how long it took.

Should I stick with Tanner? Tail one of the others? Or do something else—like get on a plane and go home?

I turned it over in my head a few times, but I couldn’t decide. I could feel myself slipping backwards again, back into the dim, clenched-stomach place where nothing mattered and everything was gray. I missed my boat. I missed Nicky and Captain Art and the smell of the cat under my house. I wanted to feel the water moving me again, the fresh salty tang of it on my face. I didn’t want to be here.

But I
was
here. And if I let myself start thinking about that, it was going to lead me down again.

For my own sake, and for the sake of solving a couple of murders that seemed to matter more than a lot of others, I had to keep moving. What I did wasn’t important; I just had to do
something.
Anything.

That took some of the pressure off. Surprisingly, I felt a little better. I felt so much better I was hungry again. I went downstairs, got in my car and drove to Norm’s down on Sunset. I had a ham and cheese omelette, whole-wheat toast, and orange juice. It tasted pretty much like it was supposed to taste. I decided that was a good omen.

I used the phone book outside the restaurant to look up Doyle and Chismond. Most of the book was missing, ripped out by people with no pencils and short memories. The page that would have listed Chismond was gone, but I found Doyle’s address.

Okay, I thought. Another sign. This was my day.

I drove over to Hancock Park, where Doyle had one of the beautiful Tudor homes they grow there. It sat behind a high hedge, with a couple of big trees in the yard. I could just see the top of a tree house sticking up. Doyle wasn’t married; maybe it was from a previous owner.

I pulled in under a tree across the street and looked at the house for a minute.

It was a very quiet neighborhood. All the lawns were neatly mown. There was no litter in the gutters. No traffic passed through on the way to somewhere else. In fact, about all I could see or hear was one mockingbird, sitting on a wire a half-block away and warbling with measured dignity.

Doyle was almost certainly at work. I wasn’t sure what I could expect to get from looking at his house, but in a way it was out of my hands. I had been led here by a good breakfast and a savaged telephone book.

So I looked at the house. I had been looking at it for about five minutes when my car door was snatched open and something cold pushed into my ear.

“Neighborhood Watch,” a soft voice said. “Can I help you with something?”

Out of the corner of my eyes I could see the gunman. He was in his thirties, big, with short dirty-blond hair and a Hawaiian shirt. He looked very fit. He’d moved up on me quietly and smoothly and I was caught.

I was more pissed-off than scared. I hadn’t heard a thing. I was supposed to be street-smart and I had let this goon into my lap without noticing anything.

And now he was leaning his weight on the top of the car door and moving the tip of his gun against my ear with a nasty grin.

So I did something stupid. I jerked my hands up in front of my face, as if I was scared. I mumbled, “Oh, please—” while I half-turned and got my foot on the door. Then I kicked at the door as hard as I could.

It was a bad idea. If somebody has a gun in your ear it’s generally good form to ask politely what they’d like you to do, and then do it.

But I was mad. This was supposed to be my lucky day. Things were supposed to go my way this morning. If you can get a decent breakfast in L.A., anything can happen. So I moved without really thinking.

What happened was that when I kicked the car door it caught him squarely on the chin and the Neighborhood Watch clown went sprawling on his butt. I was out of the car as he fell back and clunked his head on the pavement.

He lay there for a moment, dazed. I moved to him quickly, plucking the gun from his fingers. I shook my head in surprise when I saw the weapon. It was a Glock 9mm with a fifteen-shot magazine and something that looked an awful lot like an illegal silencer on the end.

If this guy was Neighborhood Watch, what was in this neighborhood? The Corleone family’s summerhouse?

I checked the chamber on the gun. Sure enough, he had a round in it. The maniac could have blown my head off. I pumped the round out and into the gutter.

I leaned over and grabbed a handful of Hawaiian shirt. I pulled him to his feet and shoved him up against my car. As I did, I felt something under his shirt, so I gave him a quick frisking.

I came up with a large bronze medallion on a chain around his neck.

His pockets were empty, except for a wallet and a set of keys on a large ring. There was a small silver sword hanging from the keychain. On the blade were some tiny characters. As near as I could make out they said,
Is Thusa Mo Thua Chatha.

I opened the wallet. He had a driver’s license in the name of Phillip Moss, and an Orange County address. “I think you’re in the wrong neighborhood,” I told him as he grunted and shook his head to clear it.

He glared at me. “Who are you?” he demanded, with a very tight-lipped snarl.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry. You had your chance. Now it’s my turn.” I held up the gun in front of him. “It’s not polite to stick your gun in a stranger’s ear. But I’ve got your Q-tip now. So why don’t you tell me what you’re doing wandering around with a cannon?

“It’s my weapon,” he said.

“I’m sure it is. So what was it doing in my ear?”

“You have no right to take that weapon.”

I sighed. “You don’t get it, do you? It’s not about the weapon anymore. It’s about you, Phil. Who are you and what are you doing here?”

His eyes narrowed, and he nodded slightly as if something finally made sense. “Zog,” he said, in a tone of voice like he was saying
Eureka.

“Well, you’ve got me there, pal,” I told him.

“Z-O-G,” he said. Maybe he figured that anybody who moved fast enough to get the drop on him couldn’t spell.

“I’ll need a receipt for the pistol,” he said.

I gave up. L.A. was the kind of town where any damned fool could show up and put a gun in your ear, and this was getting me nowhere.

“Here,” I said, sliding the clip out of the handle. “Take the damn thing,” I told him, and put the pistol in his hands. “Go play with your acorns.”

He just looked at the gun in his hands, then looked up at me again. His eyes narrowed. “What the hell is this?” he asked.

“It’s a Glock nine-millimeter,” I told him. “I’m keeping the clip.”

“Just like that, huh?” he said. I could see now that he had the gun back he thought he was going to get tough again. “I don’t think so—” And he raised the gun up, pointed it at my nose, and pulled the trigger.

He had obviously not seen me jack the round out of the chamber, but I was still shocked. Neighborhood Watch was getting damned unfriendly.

“I don’t think so, either,” I told him. I slapped him hard and fast on the face. His head rocked to the side and met my left hand coming across for another slap on the other side of the face. His head swung the other way and I gave him one more.

“I don’t like guns in my nose, or my ear, or any other body cavity. If I ever see you again I’m going to pull your head off and shove it so far up your ass you’ll be looking out your own neck. Now get moving.”

He put a hand up to his face. It was the hand with the gun. It looked like it hurt. “Your day is coming, you filthy—”

I held up my hand again like I was going to hit him. He tried to step back and ran into the car. So he slid along the car and scrambled onto the sidewalk, grabbing for his dignity.

“You haven’t heard the last of this, mud-boy,” he said. And then he turned and marched off, disappearing around the corner without looking back.

I climbed back into my car. I suddenly had a lot to think about.

“He called you
mud-boy?”
Ed asked me, his inverted
V
eyebrows climbing up until they were almost lost on top of his head.

“And Zog,” I said. “He called me Zog twice. He even spelled it for me.”

“Damn,” said Ed. He let his eyebrows slide back down into position and fired up a Kool. “What you make of that shit?”

I shook my head at him. “I don’t know what to make of it. I never heard any of it before. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it might mean something. You can take coincidence only so far.”

“And you already there, Billy.”

“Yeah. Past there.”

Ed leaned back. He reached his hand all the way around the back of his head and scratched the other side, puffing on the Kool that dangled from his fingers of his other hand. “So you think maybe he wasn’t really Neighborhood Watch, huh?”

I shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe he’s with Pinkerton’s and he thought I was Jesse James. But there was something about this guy.”

He gave me a lazy smile. “Uh-huh. Must be something, he get his gun in your ear like that.”

“That’s part of it,” I admitted. “The guy moved pretty good. He looked like he was in very good shape, knew how to use the gun, all that. But—” I stopped talking, because I couldn’t figure out how to say it.

I didn’t have to figure it out. The Kevin Costner lookalike sauntered over and dropped a folder on Ed’s desk. He looked at me, then looked at Ed.

Ed stared back without touching the folder. After a few seconds Kevin shrugged and walked away.

Ed sighed and opened the folder. After a moment he gave his head a slight nod. “Well, well.”

“Isn’t there supposed to be a third
well?
So it goes, ‘Well, well,
well’?”

“Billy, you can have all the
wells
you want. You just hit a gusher.”

He flipped the folder over to me. It was a rap sheet for Phillip L. Moss. I scanned it.

Phil was a very busy guy. When he wasn’t helping out with Neighborhood Watch he was spending a lot of time eating public food. He’d been inside for assault, aggravated assault, disorderly conduct, attempted murder, and public nuisance more times than the whole local chapter of Hell’s Angels. He was also a known former member of CSA.

I looked up at Ed. “CSA? Like Confederate States of America?”

The famous Cheshire grin appeared. This was making Ed happy. “The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord.” He said it like it was the tag line for a sermon. “I’m not sure if they still in business, but we can find out.”

“I’m sure we could,” I said, “but why would we want to?”

Ed looked at me and shook his head sadly. “What we gonna do with you, son? You gettin’ all pathetic on me. CSA was one of the original white racist gun clubs, Billy. You know, crawling ’round in the mud with an AR–15 pretending you shooting at evil niggers trying to integrate your wife. Survivalism mixed with racism. You never hear about that shit?”

“Oh,” I said. I had a vague memory of something like that. “They had a commune in, uh, Mississippi or something.”