She drew them each a draft beer, they went to a table to drink them. Ballard made moody wet rings with his glass.
“All I’ve got is negatives. I’ve seen his file down at the union — nothing in it I didn’t know. He missed their important strike vote Executive Council meeting on Monday night—”
“He was religious about those meetings,” said Beverly.
“His place has been torn up—”
“I knew it! I just knew it! I’ve been afraid to go over there in case I’d find... find...”
“Nothing there to scare you, Bev. It looked to me like whoever it was didn’t find whatever they were looking for. And Danny’s ten-speed bike was missing.”
“That’s good?” she asked in an uncomprehending voice.
He leaned across the table, took her hands, squeezed them. Despite the steaming water, they were cold. He felt like a bastard for having gotten himself sidetracked into his involvement with Amalia Pelotti when he should have been sticking to the Danny hunt. But what else could he have done that he hadn’t done to find Danny?
“It’s okay, Bev — honest. It’ll be okay. There’s just no reason they would have stolen Danny’s bike. And I checked if he’d had an accident — no reports of any. I think he left of his own power before they got there, because you’re almost impossible to spot on a bike, and really impossible to tail by car.”
“Then why hasn’t he at least called me?”
“Last thing he would do if he was involved in some investigation of his own,” said Ballard quickly. “Anyone looking for him would try you first if they thought you knew anything.”
“Do you think... I’m in danger?”
“No. I don’t think you ever were. If nobody’s been around asking questions by now, they won’t be.”
He stood up, started to prowl. She watched him with still-worried eyes. “Was he involved in an investigation?”
Ballard ran through in his mind the things he and Bart had talked about, the revelation that Danny had gotten Bart and Petrock together. He couldn’t tell even Bev about Bart’s undercover charade, not while the cops had Bart as a prime suspect in Petrock’s death; but he had to tell her something.
“Yes. He was.”
“What sort of investigation?”
“Danny got Petrock together with... a P.I. he wanted to put into the Tenderloin undercover.”
Bev was on her feet. “And Petrock is dead! Oh Christ, Danny is—”
“When they killed Petrock, they killed the necessity to go after Danny, don’t you see that?”
He could see that. He hoped he was right. They were facing each other across the table, almost like antagonists. He took her hands, guided her back into her chair, sat down across from her again. At least her hands had warmed up.
“If they didn’t kill the undercover guy, and they didn’t, why would they kill Danny?”
“Then goddammit, why is he hiding?”
He put his arms around her and noticed that her hips, of their own accord, had started moving against him. She took his hands and started for the door behind the bar that led to the flight of stairs to her apartment.
“You can get some sleep upstairs here...”
Any other time Larry would have jumped at the chance to jump Beverly’s bones. Hell, Danny could take care of himself, it was one of the big reasons he’d taken on the hunt for her. But now... Now all of Ballard’s sexual fantasies were coming to bloom at once, crowding in on him, jostling together, canceling one another out. But he couldn’t just...
“Who is she?” Bev murmured.
“Who is who?”
“Whoever fucked you blind last night.”
“It’s just sleeping on the damned couch,” he said lamely. “And being so damned worried about Danny,” he added to the part in her clean blond hair. Her scalp smelled of some floral shampoo. Wasn’t what he said the truth? “I just...”
Beverly laughed and pushed him away with a dancer’s thrust of her hips.
“Let me tell you about the last time I was with Danny,” she said. “Everything. What he said, what I said, what he did. I’ll take it right from the top...”
“Yeah, that’s the best thing to do.” Then he swung off on a tangent, asking, “By the way, why did you tell Kearny that I was looking for Danny?”
“He was drinking beer in here the other night, he acted as if he knew all about it...” She ran down, seeing the disgusted look on Ballard’s face. “He suckered me?”
So that’s how Kearny had known. “Yeah,” said Ballard, his voice grudging even to his own ears as he continued, “Well, at least you got taken by the best in the business.”
Walpurgisnacht
III
Danny Marenne was singing:
Danny thought, Mais le chorus était terrible. Ils chants comme les oiseaux de mer.
As if to emphasize his thought, another California gull swooped above him, crying raucously, black-tipped wings fully spread, so low that Danny’s squinting salt-rimed eyes caught the greenish legs and even the tiny red drop like blood on the lower mandible. Then it was gone, its cries fading.
Il faut chanter encore. He started to sing again:
Danny stopped singing to mutter aloud, “Vraiment pour I’amour de Dieu. Bon Dieu, quelle mal de tête...”
A wave thudded down so close to him that the sand shook and froth swirled around him, stinging the dozens of bruises and abrasions on his body.
Monsieur Parnell, his English teacher at the little stoneblock Algerian schoolhouse, snapped at him, “Parlez en anglais. En anglais, monsieur Marenne!”
Okay. He was starting to come out of it. Slightly. Enough to start thinking in the English that had been his native tongue for a brace of decades now.
He said aloud, “Shit, it hurts like the death of a thousand cuts. Okay, Mr. Parnell?”
But what hurts like the death of a thousand cuts?
Salt water in open cuts and scrapes, of course.
And his head...
He put up a cautious hand. Knot the size of a large plum on one side. Ear ripped open. Part of his scalp folded back.
Hell of a whack into the rocks, probably thrown there by the waves. Concussion. How? Where? When? Why? Who?
He knew who he was, all right. Jacques Daniel Marenne.
But why was he here? And where was here?
Foot of a California bluff, obviously. Probably along the Coast Highway north of San Francisco. On the way to Stinson Beach? Something tremored in his memory, was gone.
Okay, forget that for the moment. How had he gotten here? Fallen down the cliff? He moved his head cautiously. Tide must be coming in: another unusually big wave might come right over him. He’d survive that one, but how many?
Had to move. Worry about how you got here later.
Danny made cautious inventory. He was at the base of black rocks rising from the sand. Must have been in the water, thrown up here by a big wave of a high tide. Judging from his truly astounding headache, he had a concussion. How bad? No way to see whether one pupil was dilated, the other not, almost always the sign of bleeding in the tissue around the brain...