“I heard it was a big ring. How much did this investigator cost?”
“A couple of hundred dollars. I got a lot for the ring. Thousands. I put the rest of the money aside in case Hilly needed it.
I think the future hit her all of a sudden. Lacy looked as if she was going to break down on me.
“What is the investigator’s name?” I asked.
She pulled herself together enough to manage a wry smile. “Smith. Can you believe it? John Smith. Are you going to call him?”
“Do you think I should?”
Lacy’s eyes were glassy with tears. She must have seen me as a bright blur in my parrot shirt. Yet her gaze was intense. She pushed aside the tray of catsup bottles she had filled so that she could move closer to me.
“What are you after?” she asked. Not a challenge. More an offer.
“I want to know Hillary. I want to know how she got lost. I’ve talked to a lot of homeless kids over the years. Most of them come from horrible, abusive backgrounds. Rich and poor. Sometimes you can save the kid from the street, help him heal. The thing you usually cannot do is send him home again. The streets are too often better.
“Right from the beginning, I knew Hillary was different. It wasn’t abuse that exiled her. It was something traumatic. After we found Randy, I began to wonder if she was afraid for her life.”
“Why didn’t she come to me?” Lacy hissed through clenched teeth.
“Maybe to protect you.”
“Oh, Hillary.” She folded her hands, but it didn’t stop them from shaking. I covered her hands with mine and held them tight.
“You said you put the money from the ring aside,” I said. She nodded.
“Is there very much?”
Again she nodded, with some vigor this time. “More than I earned all last year working here. Why?”
“There’s something you can do for Hillary.”
“Like what?”
“Take the money and go away until this is over. Until we find out what Hillary knew.”
The suggestion startled her. “I can’t go away. I’m in the middle of my last college semester.”
“Think about it. But don’t think too long, Lacy. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Just go farther away than Hillary did.”
CHAPTER 13
Mike’s car sat at a funny angle, as if the front end had fallen into a sinkhole. Holes open up all the time in California – earth tremors, leaky water pipes, oil-land subsidence. They regularly swallow up bigger things than borrowed cars.
Thinking enough already, I muttered something that wasn’t a Hail Mary and started to jog across the public lot behind the sports bar to see what had happened. The Nikon in my bag bounced against my side.
I don’t know which I saw first, the long clean cuts in the front tire or the bill of a dark cap poking out from under the back bumper. I took a quick hit of adrenaline.
“You there,” I shouted, and opened my stride to sprint. I was maybe five car lengths away. “Get away from that car!”
The rear tires blew then, pop, pop, in quick succession. A man scuttled away like a crab running from under a rock, a big man with a cap pulled low over his face, a loose Dodgers windbreaker, jeans. He must have been a good runner once, the way he was pumping, but he was long past his prime. I lit out after him.
We played cat and mouse among the cars in the lot, then he broke into the open and jackrabbited down a side residential street. He opened a lead, stretching fifteen yards to twenty before I turned it on some more. I wanted to keep him in sight, but I didn’t want to catch him. I hadn’t seen him drop his razor.
He was already breathing hard. My strength is endurance, not speed. So I kept a space between us and let him wear himself out. As long as I didn’t lose sight of him before he ran out of gas, I knew I could run him down.
He sidestepped a convention of tricycles on the sidewalk. I vaulted over them, gaining maybe six yards on him. He looked back a couple of times, but I was too busy to catch his face.
I had my bag slung in front. As I ran, I attached a long zoom lens to my Nikon. Focus is tricky with telephoto lenses. You need to be very steady, because the exposure has to be relatively slow. When I had a clear stretch of sidewalk in front of me – no lawn mowers, no Rollerbladers – I said a Hail Mary in atonement, never knowing how much help I might need, and raised the camera to my eye.
I whistled my Candlestick Park earsplitter. Startled, he turned, and I snapped. To make sure he had seen what he saw, he looked again, the jerk. And I got him again.
By then I was gaining on him. I had to drop back, because the only way I wanted to catch him was on film. I slowed to keep the distance between us at a safe fifteen yards. I photographed his back, zoomed in on the Dodger jacket, got the label on his jeans. When he turned into an alley, he gave me a beautiful profile. Barrymore couldn’t have been more cooperative.
I got to the mouth of the alley, and I stopped. There had been people on the street watching us, gawking. Some of them had talked to me, but I was too involved to hear them. As long as we were in the open, I felt sufficiently safe. The alley was a different equation.
With the camera in front of my face, holding my breath, holding my hand steady, I finished the roll on his retreating back. He looked back at least one more time for me. Bless his heart.
By the time he got halfway down the alley, he was really puffing, dragging his left leg a little. He ducked between two houses and I let him disappear. I had what I needed: smoking gun, smoking camera, same thing.
On my way back to the parking lot, I rewound the film, took it out of the camera, and reloaded. I felt good. I wasn’t even breathing hard. There were a few sticky details waiting for me in the parking lot, but overall, I thought things were looking up.
I know how to change a tire. My father taught me before I got my driver’s license. There really is nothing to it, once you get the spare out of the trunk and figure out which part is the jack and which is the handle. I have changed a few tires since. One time in a jungle in Honduras. At night. No big deal.
When I looked at Mike’s car, though, changing a tire was not the problem. The problem was, where did I begin when I had one spare and four flats?
I called the Long Beach police. Then I paged Mike.
“I think it’s a sex thing with this guy,” I said when Mike returned the call. I was at a public phone next to a dry cleaner’s, watching the police hoist Mike’s Blazer with its slashed tires onto a flatbed tow truck. “He’s impotent, so he has to deflate anything that’s blown up bigger and harder than he is. Rafts, tires, whatever.”
“Uh huh,” Mike growled. “I think it’s your balloon he wants to burst.”
“He just wants to scare me.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s doing just fine. I’m scared. He was so close to me, Mike. If I hadn’t seen his hat, I might have tripped over him. Now I’m afraid for Lacy. He followed me. He must know I talked to her.”
“Stay with the local cops until I come and get you.”
“Don’t come. Everything’s under control. The helicopters are still circling overhead, the neighborhood is sealed off. Maybe they won’t catch him this time, but they’ll force him to lie low for a while.”
“How will you get home?”
“Sergeant Mahakian from last night? He told me about a cheapy car-rental place just up Pacific Coast Highway. He’ll drop me by there as soon as they’ve finished tagging and loading your car. Then he’s taking Lacy to the airport. She’s really shaken.” I paused.