“She mentioned him.”
A long pause then, during which Hess deduced he was supposed to make something of this friend. He sensed the amount of brainpower necessary for such a formulation would be a lot more than he wanted to spend.
“McNally told me she’d mentioned a guy, is all. Never introduced them. I’m curious if she might be sleeping with this man.”
“I’m not.”
“Find out about it and let me know. You can add that and the switchblade to your job description too, if you want to. Help me, Tim. I’m helping you.”
Hess looked at him.
Brighton sat back. Hess felt the resentment stirring inside — resentment that his own stupid cigarette addictions had led him to this position, and resentment that Chuck Brighton had allowed peevishness to bloom in his old age. I got cancer and Bright got petty.
“How are you feeling, Tim?”
“Strong as an ox. A little tired now and then.”
“I admire you.”
“Thanks.”
“And that has nothing to do with feeling sorry for you.”
“I hope not,” said Hess, but in fact he knew it did, and it broke his heart in a minor way to hear it from an old friend who was ordering him to piss on a fellow deputy half his age.
Hess stood and shook Brighton’s hand.
Twenty-Four
Merci studied the two missing persons files that Casik had bird-dogged for her, then hovered around the unbelievably slow clerk who processed the purses into evidence. She estimated the guy had an IQ of about 50.
Six, she thought. Six. The idea made her furious.
By the time she got to the gym she was even more furious. And livid at Kamala for drinking on the night in question — then not admitting it until later.
But Merci knew she was primarily angry at herself for not hurrying up the hypnosis and the release of the sketch. If it had been all over the newspapers and TV two days ago, like it should have been, Ronnie Stevens might be working at Goldsmith’s today. It was a grinding guilt she felt, tangible, right there in her throat. And now, by the looks of it, three more women had been taken by the Purse Snatcher. Six. Time to work off the rage.
The weight room was empty on Sunday. She looked at herself in the mirror when she walked in — face in a scowl, sweats disheveled, arms up, big hands twisting her hair into a wad and applying an elastic band and thought: Loser. You are a large dark-haired loser who belongs in Traffic.
She humped the stationary cycle for thirty minutes with the resistance up almost all the way. She was dripping sweat and standing on the pedals to make them move after eight minutes and the final twenty-two were actual torture. Blister time. Good, she thought. Let the pain bring the gain. She got off the bike and wobbled to the ab cruncher on legs that felt like petrified wood. Good again: hurt to learn, learn to hurt.
She ran the Nautilus circuit once light and once heavy, resting five seconds between each of the three sets and thirty seconds between each station. Her heart was beating fast and light as a bird’s, fast as that wren’s that was blown from its nest in a Santa Ana wind one year. She’d found it in the grass and cradled it home in her hands while its heart beat like some overcharged machine against the inside of her middle finger. The bird had died overnight and Merci prepared a tissue box to bury it, but her mother flushed it down the toilet. She’d never had luck with animals: her dog chewed the hair off its own body; her cats ran away; her parakeets died quick; her hamster bit her. Merci catalogued these failures as she struggled on the chin-up bar — twelve was more than she could do so she set her sights on fourteen and slid to a gasping heap on the ground after thirteen.
Up, loser. You have work to do.
Time for the free weights. She had just settled under the bench press bar when she heard some commotion near the door. She turned her head to the mirrored wall and watched in the distorting glass as Mike McNally and three of his deputy friends swaggered in, all muscles and mustaches and towels over their necks, smiles merry to the point of insanity. The atmosphere of the room changed instantly. Suddenly she was aware of herself, her body, her clothes, her sweat, what she might look like, what they might do. It was like having 30 percent of your energy sucked down some useless hole. Fucking great.
She did her best to will them out of her universe, turning to look up at the rusted bar above her nose, spreading her hands wide for a pec burn on her beginning weight of eighty pounds, digging the leather palms of her gloves against the worn checkering of the grip.
“Hi, Merci!”
“Hi, guys!”
“Need a spot?”
“Sure don’t!”
Then up with it. Ignore them. She liked the feel of the weights balancing above her. She moved her left hand over just a hair to get it right. Then the slow, deliberate motion — all the way down to her chest, then all the way back up again — ten times in all, not super heavy, really, but you could feel eighty pounds when your body weight was one forty. Three sets. Every rep was hotter and slower. Grow to burn, burn to grow.
At one hundred pounds she had to go a lot slower, but she got the ten. She heard the sweat tap-tapping to the plastic bench as she sat there breathing hard and deciding whether to max at one thirty-five or one forty.
She picked the lighter weight to look stronger in front of the men, a decision that angered her. She was ignoring them but aware of them in the mirrors, where she saw they were ignoring her but aware of her, too. They laughed suddenly then and two of them glanced over at her. Mike was looking down as if regretting something he’d just said. Merci wished she lived on a different planet. She thought again of Phil Kemp’s ugly words and his touches and felt like all her strength was about to rush away.
Stay focused. Will away these things.
She heaved up on the bar and ground out five reps before she realized she wouldn’t make ten. Six was a labor. Seven wasn’t even up yet when she knew she’d had enough. The sweat popped off her lips as she exhaled. Kind of stuck, actually, not enough gumption to get it back up to safety on the stand, too much pride to set it down on her heaving chest and rest. Mike McNally now appeared in the north quadrant of her defocusing vision, looking down at her, a blond-haired Vikingesque once-upon-a-time boyfriend gritting “One more... one more... one more, Merci” at her until she felt the bar rise magically with his help. Her breathing was fast and short. She felt lungshot. Then she felt McNally ceding the weight back to her and down she let it come, all the way to her sternum, pause, then halfway up, then a little more than halfway, arms and bar wobbling like crazy now and Mike’s lift helping her get it up then suddenly one side shot down and the other shot up and iron crashed with a clang and the bar smacked into her rib cage as the weights slid off and chimed to the floor beneath her head.
She was aware of three more bodies around her, aware of Mike’s cursing them away, telling them she was fine, aware of gripping his hand with hers and rising to a sitting position on the bench. Little lights circled her vision like the stars around a cartoon character hit with a hammer.
“You know the circuit court’s going to hear the scent-box case,” he was saying.
“That’s great, Mike.” Merci wasn’t positive what century she was in.
“I know it’s going to be accepted. I know that a hundred years from now they’ll be using those boxes in court all the time. A good scent box and a good dog. That’s my answer to high-tech crime solving. Plus we’re going to patent the thing and make a million. I don’t know what I’ll name it. Mike’s Truth Box or something.”