I sat there, my mind reeling. I heard a ringing in the distance as I stared at Kate’s letter in my hands. I looked at the words, not reading them, but wondering how things had gotten so bad for her.
The ringing intensified, and I looked up from the letter, irritated that some idiot didn’t realize his cell phone was ringing.
Then I realized I was the idiot.
I stuck the letter in my pocket and pulled out the phone. “Yeah?”
“We’ve gotta talk,” Randall Tower said.
I stood up, gripping the phone tighter. “Fucking right we do.”
“I need to talk to you,” he said, and I realized he was drunk.
“Where are you?” I asked, heading for the door. “Because I’m coming.”
“Meet me at the gliderport,” he said, his words running together. “We can fly away together.”
I hung up the phone and sprinted to my car.
59
As I weaved in and out of the evening traffic on I-5, I called Liz on my cell.
“Guess what I found?” I said, when she picked up.
“What?”
I told her about the money and the note.
“Do you have it with you?” she asked.
“The note, yeah. The money, no.”
“Where’s the money? In the locker?”
“No, Ramon has it.”
“Who the hell is Ramon?”
“Costilla’s sidekick.”
“Shit.”
I passed a slow-moving van on the right as I flew past Old Town and Presidio Park. “I know. Nothing I could do, though. But you need to see the note.”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “There’s something else you should know though.”
“What?”
“Charlotte Truman’s dead.”
My chest tightened. “What? How?”
“Not sure. After you talked to her, I called a friend in LAPD and asked him to notify me if her name popped up in anything unusual. He just called. They found her in her hotel room.” She paused. “A witness got a license plate leaving the hotel in a hurry.”
“They run it?”
“Yeah, it was rented out of Lindbergh Field. By Randall Tower.”
It was like I saw the punch coming but didn’t bother ducking. “What a fucking surprise that is.”
“Agreed. Where are you right now?”
“On the five, the La Jolla Parkway exit,” I said, trying to block Charlotte’s face from my mind.
“You going to see Carter?”
“No, I’m going to talk to Randall.”
The line buzzed for a moment, and I knew she wasn’t happy. “This isn’t for you to handle.”
“The fuck it isn’t,” I said. “I just got off the phone with the asshole.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know. He called me, said we had to meet. And I agreed.”
“You need to wait for me. Or Wellton,” she said. “He was on his way to Westwood to meet with the LA guys about Truman. I can call him on his cell.”
“Randall called me, Liz,” I said, gripping the steering wheel tighter. “I’m going to see him. And I’m not waiting. Come if you want, I don’t care. But I’m not waiting.”
“Where are you meeting?” she asked, the aggravation clear in her voice.
“He says he’s up at the gliderport.”
“Noah, don’t do anything until one of us gets there. You got it.”
“Bye,” I said and clicked off the phone.
It rang again five seconds later. I figured it was Liz again, but the caller ID on the phone showed a number I didn’t recognize. I punched the button. “Hello?”
“Dude,” Carter said. “I’m starving. Where’s my dinner?”
“Carter, I’m busy right now,” I said, swinging the Blazer over into the far right lane. “I can’t.”
“What’s going on?”
I told him what I’d found, what Liz found, and where I was headed.
“Wait for Liz,” he said. “If you tear him up, there’s gonna be nothing she can do.”
“The letter’s good enough,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” he said. “It doesn’t mean shit. Doesn’t mean he killed her.”
“She was afraid of him, Carter,” I yelled into the phone. “She was hiding the money. Charlotte Truman is dead. Ramon told me again that they didn’t kill Kate. I believe him.”
“You believe Costilla’s thug? Come on. You’re not thinking, Noah.”
I fired the phone at the passenger door. I took the La Jolla Village Drive exit and headed toward the Torrey Pines gliderport to find Randall Tower.
60
The gliderport lurked just south of the long fairways of the Torrey Pines Golf Course, a giant clearing amidst the thick trees and ultra-modern buildings of the biotech corridor along Torrey Pines Road. It was a magnificent takeoff spot for the crazies who were into hang gliding, a flat clifftop that abruptly disappeared and sent them shooting out over Black’s Beach, three hundred feet above the Pacific.
I turned down the paved road that ended in a cul-de-sac. Access to the dirt road and parking area was chained off, a sign proclaiming the port closed after eight at night. A blue Ford Taurus was parked next to the sign.
I parked the Blazer behind the Taurus and got out. I blinked several times, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. I shivered into the cool wind that whipped up and off the cliff face, listening to the ocean roar in the distance.
I walked around the empty lot and down the narrow dirt road. I squinted into the night and barely made out a faint light up ahead where I knew the steep path down to Black’s began. As I got closer, I heard whistling.
Randall was seated on the dirt landing at the top of the stairs, beneath the signs proclaiming the danger of the cliffs and the unstable path, his back to the ocean. A dim, single bulb light barely illuminated the signs, a whistling Randall, about eight empty beer bottles, and one ominous-looking syringe. His light blue oxford was untucked, the left sleeve rolled up above the elbow, and his khakis were wrinkled and dirty at the knees. He didn’t seem to notice that just three feet to his left, the earth disappeared.
He was holding a bottle of Grey Goose in his hand, and he lifted it toward me as a greeting. “Hey, Mister Super Private Detective is here. Woohoo.”
“Yeah, I’m here,” I said, my jaw aching from the clench I’d placed it in since talking to him on the phone.
He made an exaggerated act of looking at his watch. “Well, it’s about time.” He wiggled the vodka bottle in the air. “Can I offer you a drink?”
I kicked the bottle out of his hand, and it went flying down the steep path, shattering somewhere down below. I grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him off the ground and to his feet.
“I don’t want a drink, asshole,” I said, jerking him closer so he could see my face. “And I don’t want to share a needle, either. I want to know what you did to Kate.”
His head lolled to one side, no fear on his face, just drunken, strung-out comfort in his glazed-over eyes. “Come on, man. Noah. Buddy.” He smiled, his eyes half open. “Let’s have one last beer together.”
I spun him away from the stairs and threw him to the ground, his body hitting the dirt in front of the stairs like a bag of rocks.
He looked up at me, surprised, then pointed a finger at me. “You are so strong, man.”
The anger erupted inside my chest, and I jumped on him, driving my fist straight down on his nose. It collapsed like a stepped-on snail, and he screamed, his voice echoing out over the water into the dark.
“Listen to me,” I said, lowering my face next to his, my anger giving my voice an edge I didn’t know it had. “I know you killed Charlotte Truman, and you’re gonna tell me what you did to Kate. Or you are going over the side of this cliff and then I’m gonna come down and break everything that’s not already broken.”
“Charlotte,” he slurred. “I didn’t want to.”
“I wanna know about Kate.”
“You don’t understand,” he mumbled.
The blood from his nose looked purple in the dark. His eyes crossed as he tried to get a look at the damage in the middle of his face. He touched it with his hand, winced, and then clumsily tried to shove me off of him. I moved to the side, but kept a hand in the middle of his chest.