“No!”
The sudden cry made me jump a little. When I looked at her, her eyes were wide open and red-flecked drool crawled from the corner of her mouth. But she was not seeing me or anything else in the room. She muttered something that I couldn’t make out, then began babbling in fits and starts. I sank to one knee, leaned my head close enough to her mouth to feel and smell the sour warmth of her breath.
“Stop it stop it stop it... crazy bastard what’s the matter with you, leave me alone! Dirty son of a bitch!” Incoherent. “How d’you like it huh? How d’you like getting hit you sick creep... break your fuckin’ head open...” Incoherent. “Oh shit what am I gonna do now... kill me if he finds me...” Incoherent. “Please... hurts so much... puking up blood he must’ve broke something inside...” Incoherent. “I’ve got to have it for the pain... something anything please Grant please...” A series of whimpers, more sentence fragments, as if a nightmare scene kept replaying on a loop in her head.
I’d heard enough. Had enough in here. I straightened, made sure the blankets covered her completely, and then went back outside and shut the door behind me.
Johnson was standing there, running his hands up and down his sides as if trying to cleanse them. He said, “They’re on the way.”
“Make sure you wait for them. And make sure you forget I was here.”
“I will. What’re you gonna do?”
“Find the man who hurt her like that.”
“Then what?”
“That depends on him. Did she say anything about him? Where he might be?”
“No.”
“Mention the name Dingo at any time?”
“Once. She said if Dingo found her he’d kill her.”
“She tell you where she was before she came here? Where he beat her up?”
“No. She wouldn’t talk about any of that.”
I brushed past him, went to the MG. The driver’s door wasn’t locked. Spots of dried blood on the driver’s bucket; nothing else on any of the seats. And nothing on the floorboards or among the clutter in the glove box. I pulled the trunk release and looked in there. Nothing.
Johnson was still rooted in the same spot. “All right,” I said to him, “I’m going now. Stay inside with her until somebody comes. Keep her warm, don’t let her kick the blankets off.”
“I’ll take care of her,” he said.
Sure you will, I thought. Just like you’ve been taking care of her since last night. You soft-hearted, compassionate tower of strength you.
20
I was in a foul humor by the time I got back to the city. I could not shake the feeling that I’d abandoned Annette Byers, left Grant Johnson holding an empty bag. Irrational on both counts. Byers, for Christ’s sake, was an extortionist, a thief, an accessory to the murders of Carolyn Dain and Jay Cohalan and the near-murder of me. Cold, ruthless, mercenary, badly screwed up on drugs — nobody to feel sorry for. Unless you’d seen her lying there with the red drool coming out of her mouth, the savage bruises on her belly and abdomen, the evident internal damage. A scared, battered, pain-wracked kid — that was the image I’d carried away with me. And Johnson, for all his shortcomings, was another scared kid with a dependent wife and three little kids of his own. Yeah, I felt bad. But not bad enough to turn around and go back at any point, or to relinquish custodianship of the money.
If I was reading correctly what Byers had said in her delirium, she and Manganaris had had some sort of falling out — over the seventy-five thousand, likely — and he’d gone to work on her with his fists. Might have ended up killing her just as he’d killed the others, except that she’d managed to turn the tables somehow, put him out of commission long enough to escape with the briefcase. It was possible she’d made him dead, but I didn’t want to believe it. If she had, she wouldn’t have gone begging to a former lover she hadn’t seen in years, all scared and desperate; she could have holed up anywhere and felt safe enough. Fear of the police alone wasn’t enough to have sent her into hiding in that isolated fishing shack. Fear of Manganaris was.
And where was Manganaris? Out somewhere hunting for her? Hiding at the Pueblo Street address? Wherever he was, he had to be in a frenzy of hate, rage, frustration. And if he was using meth or some other drug, he was worse than a madman on the loose — he was a walking time bomb.
Oh, they were some pair, Byers and Dingo. Set up a bleeder scam, doublecross Cohalan, murder two people in cold blood, doublecross each other, do physical harm to each other — all for seventy-five thousand dollars that neither of them had held onto for very long and would never touch again. Senseless from start to finish. Crazy. And I was feeling a thin worm of pity for her? Hell, that made me crazy, too, didn’t it?
I drove straight to O’Farrell, took the briefcase upstairs to the office. Tamara’s mood was little better than mine; her computer had crashed, been down for nearly three hours, and she’d only just gotten it up and working again. So she had nothing more for me on Manganaris, nothing yet on the other three who shared the name.
While I locked the stacks of cash in the safe for the second time, I told her about Byers and Johnson. She had only two questions.
“What’ll you do if Johnson tells the law about you being at the shack?”
“I don’t think he will. But if he does I’ll stand up to the heat when the time comes. I can’t worry about it now.”
“And the money, what about that?”
“I don’t know yet. I doubt Johnson noticed my taking the briefcase, and Byers wouldn’t have let him see it or any more of the money than what she gave him for drugs. Maybe I’ll turn it over to Fuentes or Craddock. Maybe I’ll contact Mel Bishop and ask him if Carolyn Dain had a favorite charity and donate the money anonymously in her name. She had no living relatives.”
“Better some charity than the damn state,” Tamara said.
“Probably. But I just don’t know yet.”
The Pueblo Street address was an antiquated chipped-stucco apartment building in a low-income Visitacion Valley neighborhood across from the Cow Palace. Manganaris seemed to have downscaled rather than upscaled his standard of living when he moved. Or maybe he just hadn’t liked living in one place too long, cared little about his surroundings, and took whatever rental came along cheap.
Once I’d pinpointed the building, I drove around several blocks on the lookout for an Olds Cutlass. I spotted one, but it was the wrong year and had the wrong license plate. For all I knew, he was driving something else now, but it pays to cover all the bases.
I parked around the corner on Geneva and went to the building on foot, the .38 in my coat pocket and my hand wrapped around it. There was an iron-barred security gate, but it wasn’t locked; all I had to do was push it open and walk in. Some building. Byers’ address book had Dingo’s apartment number as 302. The elevator looked creaky and unreliable, and I did not want to be closed up in anything that small here. I climbed two flights of stairs that stank of Lysol and urine. Some half-wit had fastened a condom around the knob atop one of the railings; the walls were decorated with similarly unfunny sexual references and the inexplicable marks of taggers.
The third-floor hallway had a different odor: the olfactory remnants of somebody’s Mexican dinner cooked in lard. Mouth-breathing, walking on the balls of my feet, I eased my way along to 302. Laid an ear close to the thin door panel, heard nothing, and then flattened back against the wall next to the door and reached out to rap on the wood with my left hand. I had the gun halfway clear of my pocket as I waited.