“You from Langley?”
“You know we couldn’t tell you that, even if we were.”
He nodded like we were all in on some big secret and rebandaged another tree limb.
“I’m inside reading my Bible,” he said, “when I hear this pop, then pop — pop. Little faggot had it coming. Used to have sex parties over there. I always knew one of his playmates was gonna cap his ass someday. I look out. Here comes this guy running out of the house. Jumps in a car he’s got parked the wrong way in front of my house, and takes off.
“What’d he look like, the shooter?”
“Six foot, 160 maybe. Jeans. Hooded sweatshirt. Young. Didn’t see his face. No moon that night. Let there be light, God said, in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.”
“What kind of car was he driving?”
“White two-door Honda.”
My pulse kicked into overdrive.
“You didn’t, by any chance, catch the license plate, did you?”
“Three Mary King Lincoln three six eight. Got it all right up here in safe storage,” the old man said, tapping his temple with a crooked finger. “Went out with my flashlight when I heard him pull up. Was gonna call it in to traffic enforcement for the way he was parked, only he didn’t stick around long enough.”
“Did you tell the police this?”
“Let them figure it out. They all think I’m nuts, anyway.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Savannah said condescendingly.
I shot her a disapproving glance. She looked at me as if to say, “I’m just trying to help.”
“I used to be a cop,” the man said, “before them geniuses at Parker Center said I wasn’t fit to—” He pressed his left index finger to his ear, like he was on a long distance phone call with a bad connection. “But you just told me… Well, if they ain’t from Langley, where the hell are they from?”
He looked up at me, his face suddenly contorted with fear.
“You’re not from Langley at all,” he said. “The sulfur, I can smell it on you!”
He slowly backed away from me, then turned and ran back into his house, slamming and locking the door behind him. “I am Gabriel, the archangel!” he yelled. “You hear me, Beelzebub? I invoke the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of the burning bush, and order you to return to the bowels of Abaddon! Now, get the fuck off my property!”
I heard the click-clack of a round being chambered. A rifle barrel poked through a broken window. It was aiming at me.
“Five seconds, devil! Then I’m blastin’!”
Buddhism has no devils. No demons or mythological beasts. Not even any flammable shrubbery. No special effects. If any religion is low-fat, it’s Buddhism. The crazy old coot could’ve benefited from a teaching or two. But I wasn’t about to start sermonizing. Not with a rifle barrel pointed in my direction by a man who thought I was El Diablo.
I grabbed Savannah by the arm and got off his property.
TWENTY-FOUR
“You’re dreaming,” Czarnek said. “Some lunatic gives you a plate number and you expect me to just drop everything and roll out the cavalry, especially after chasing your last tip? You can forget it, Logan. I’m already in enough trouble with my supervisor as it is.”
“That lunatic’s a former cop,” I reminded Czarnek.
Savannah and I were parked down the street from the dead teacher’s house. I put the phone on speaker so she could listen in.
“I know who he is,” Czarnek said. “His name’s Norman Buckhalter. Everybody calls him ‘Abnorman.’ Got tossed off the department for a bad shooting back in the eighties. Been in and out of the psych ward ever since. Calls us all the time with all kinds of crazy shit.”
“Run the plate, get me an address, I’ll do the legwork myself. It’ll take you five minutes.”
“I run that plate, I go to jail. It’s called misuse of police resources.”
“OK, then run the plate and you check it out.”
“The cases aren’t connected, Logan.”
“Two murders, days apart, one block apart, same street number, both middle-age Latinos, and they’re not connected? We have a saying where I come from, Czarnek: ‘If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, the goddamn murders are connected.’”
“There were two different weapons used. Echevarria got shot with a .40-cal. The teacher got it with a .45. Plus, every witness we talked to said Echevarria’s shooter had brown skin. Two wits on Elmira said the guy who shot the teacher was Caucasian. And nobody except Abnorman Buckhalter said anything about seeing any white Honda.”
I let Czarnek know about the white Honda that had been seen lurking near my garage apartment shortly before the place caught fire, and how Detective Ostrow from Rancho Bonita PD was eager to compare notes with him.
“There’s a million white Hondas in the United States,” Czarnek said. “It’s probably just coincidence.”
“This is hardly what I would describe as proactive law enforcement, Detective.”
“I told you, I got gang case files piling up on my desk faster than I can read ‘em. Look, I’ll get to your Detective Ostrow when I can. And if it’ll get you off my butt, I’ll drop by Abnorman’s place. Maybe next week, OK?”
“Joe Friday’s rolling over in his grave,” I said.
“I’m sure Joe Friday would find the situation less than ideal,” Czarnek said, “as we all do.”
“You know what I find, Detective Czarnek?” Savannah blurted into the phone. “I find it amazing that you’re getting paid to be a detective, because from where I sit, it doesn’t look like you could find your ass in the dark with both hands tied behind your back, let alone find the man who killed my husband.”
She hung up on him.
“Well played,” I said.
“You think that whacko knew what he was talking about, with the license plate?”
“Just because somebody’s nuttier than a port-a-potty at an almond festival doesn’t make them incapable of conveying the truth.”
“You are one profoundly articulate guy, Logan,” Savannah said, shaking her head in disgust.
“What can I say? It’s a gift.”
The sky was streaked brown. She sniffed the air. “There’s a fire somewhere. You can smell it.”
There was always a fire somewhere in Southern California this time of year, when the offshore winds turned the arroyos and hillsides to tinder. A spark from a weed wacker and entire neighborhoods went up in flames. Yet regardless of the risks, whether by fire or temblor or mudslide or murder, no true Angelino ever gave serious thought to living anywhere else. They were all too busy, I suppose, vying for their own reality shows.
“I’ll take you to the bus station now,” Savannah said.
I didn’t protest.
She slid the Jag’s polished walnut gear shifter into drive. We drove south on Elmira Avenue, toward the freeway.
Strange how random recollections can pop into your head at any given moment for every reason and no reason at all. At that moment, my mind’s eye filled with the image of Ray Allen, my high school football coach, flinging a helmet at me in the locker room after a game for failing to catch a pass. We’d been down by three touchdowns with less than a minute to play, and the football had been thrown ten yards in front of me, but that didn’t matter to Coach Allen. “If you don’t believe in your heart you can win,” he screamed, his cheeks florid with rage, “then there’s no point in getting out of bed at the end of the day.” No one dared to correct Coach Allen. Certainly not to his face.
“Never quit,” was the message Coach Allen was selling that day. Back then, I took to heart every dumb sports cliché every coach ever trotted out — too much, probably. Now I was stuck with them. My overwhelming urge was to get on the bus and get the hell out of Dodge. The only problem is, quitters never win and winners never quit.