“A .45, firing ACP ammo.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because Automatic Colt Pistol rounds make a very distinctive sound when they’re coming at you.”
“What sort of sound?”
“Like fabric tearing.”
“I take it you’ve been shot at before?”
I shrugged. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Rosario sighed in frustration, not sure how to read me, and jotted a few notes.
“Why not bring Sheen in here and compare everybody’s versions of events?” I said. “We can see who’s telling the truth.”
“We’re not sure where Mr. Sheen is right now. He called in a complaint against you, then said he’d be unavailable until he had confirmation you were safely in custody. He said he feared for his life.”
“The guy tunes me up with a Louisville Slugger, kidnaps me, drives me out toward the desert intending to put a slug behind my ear, and he’s in fear of his life? Go interview Greg Castle. He knew what Sheen was up to last night. So did Frank Jervis, Castle’s security chief.”
“Mr. Sheen said you shot at him.”
“With what?”
“State records show you have a .357 Colt Python registered in your name.”
“Which is currently up in Rancho Bonita, under my bed. Search my apartment. You have my permission.”
Rosario wrote some more notes. Her poker face gave away nothing.
“Look, if I were a ‘sworn peace officer,’ I’d start by connecting the dots between what happened to Janet Bollinger and what happened with my airplane.”
Rosario’s cell phone played the refrain from that icon of bad ’80’s rock, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” She picked it up and read a text message that prompted her eyebrows to arch. She got up abruptly and headed for the door.
“Don’t go anywhere.”
“Oh, I’ll be here.”
If I were further along the path of enlightenment, I would’ve tried meditating. Jail, after all, is the ideal environment for contemplative introspection. But all I could think about was my ex-wife, and her snide reaction had she seen me decked out in chains and county-issued overalls.
It’s said that most men think about sex every seven seconds and are virtually incapable of distinguishing love from lust. I won’t argue with that. Sitting there, though, I found myself yearning for nothing more than Savannah’s smile. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is. But I couldn’t think about any of that now, not if I was going to figure a way out of my predicament.
Why had Sheen kidnapped me? Why had he shot at me? I replayed the DVD in my head from the night before.
It began and ended with C.W. Lazarus.
Sheen lied about not knowing who Lazarus was. Things had taken a definite turn toward Crazy Town after I’d intimated a connection between the slaying of Janet Bollinger, Lazarus’s truck, and the sabotaging of my airplane. Lazarus was the Holy Grail. He had to be. Find him, I told myself, and all things would be illuminated.
The door to the interrogation room was flung open. Rosario strode in, along with her partner, Detective Lawless, whom I assumed had been watching me the entire time behind the one-way glass. He began unchaining me.
“This is your lucky day, Logan. You’re being released.”
“To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“You tested negative for gunshot residue. We also have witnesses who’ve come forward essentially corroborating your version. We’re trying to find Mr. Sheen.”
My lucky day, indeed.
“We just need to get some paperwork out of the way,” Rosario said, “then we’ll get you out of here.”
“Any chance the good taxpayers of San Diego County could spring for another peanut butter sandwich? I’m starting to OD on Taco Bell.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Rosario said.
I tailed her out the door and down a concrete corridor, past several holding cells, including the one in which I’d cooled my heels. My sullen cell mate, Chatty Cathy, was still sitting on the floor, knees to his chest, still staring at nothing.
“Happiness is a choice,” I said.
He flipped me off without looking up.
Rosario punched some numbers into an electronic keypad, unlocking a steel door that led into a long hallway flanked by the wood-paneled offices of ranking sheriff’s administrators.
“Who were the witnesses?” I asked.
“The investigation’s ongoing. I’m not allowed to discuss those kinds of things.”
“I had a feeling you might say that.”
Rosario held the door open for me when we reached the end of the corridor. I thanked her.
“Para eso están los amigos,” she said with a little nod as I walked past her.
What are friends for?
I grasped the meaning of her words: the witnesses were likely among the same illegal migrants who’d saved my life the night before. I mouthed them a silent gracias.
Rosario escorted me through a covered sally port and into the jail’s out-processing center, where my personal items were returned to me.
“We towed your rental car,” the detective said. “I’ll drive you over to the impound lot after you’ve changed back into your street clothes.”
“Thanks, Alicia.”
“It’s Detective.”
“Detective.”
Rosario was right about one thing. She and her partner were paid to solve crimes. I wasn’t. I should’ve turned in my rented Escalade, taken the train to LA, and begged Savannah to take me back. But then Hub Walker called. He was weeping.
“I didn’t know who else to call.”
“What is it, Hub? What’s wrong?”
“My wife,” he said, barely able to get the words out. “She’s disappeared.”
Twenty-two
Walker paced the patio in his bathrobe, clutching a half-empty quart bottle of Jim Beam. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. He was drunk with worry. Or maybe just drunk.
“I’ve been trying her phone all day. She would’ve called if she got sidetracked. She’s never done anything like this before in her life. It’s not like her.”
Walker’s granddaughter wandered past where I was sitting at the patio table. She was wearing inflated water wings and her Little Mermaid swimsuit.
“Hello, Ryder.”
The little girl jumped feet-first into the deep end of the pool without responding, bobbed to the surface, and began dog paddling, water splashing everywhere. Walker barely noticed her. He plopped down in the chair next to mine and gulped a swallow of bourbon.
“I drove all over town this morning, looking for her.”
“You called the police?”
“They said they couldn’t take a report. Said she had to be gone twenty-four hours at least.” He gestured to the cast on my arm. “What happened to you?”
“Tripped on some stairs.”
He seemed not to hear me, absorbed in his own worries.
“It’s gotta be Ray Sheen,” he said. “He’s behind all of this. I know it. I can feel it.”
I wanted to believe that Walker was beyond reproach. He seemed legitimately upset. But all I felt was a vague queasiness that his wife’s sudden absence was the latest tangle in a web of deceit, and that a war hero I once idolized was somehow complicit in all of it.
“What makes you think Sheen had anything to do with your wife being gone, Hub?”
He glanced over his shoulder, waited until Ryder paddled to the far end of the pool, out of earshot, then looked back at me, struggling to keep his emotions in check.
“Sheen and Crissy have been carrying on for years.”
“You know that for a fact?”
He nodded. “She left the computer on by accident one night a month or so back. I saw some emails. Crissy told him it was a mistake. She wanted to end it. Sheen didn’t. He blackmailed her, threatened to tell me all about it if she broke it off.”