We also had a dead deputy who probably had no idea that this morning was going to be his last.
And we had plenty of questions.
Questions that hounded me as night fell and I finally made my way back to the hotel, ready to toss the memory of this crappy day into the incinerator section of my mind and move on to tomorrow.
I was tired and bummed out, and seeing Tess was like a tonic to my senses. She had Alex already asleep, which was a good sign, although I knew he wouldn’t be out for the night. I checked on him, saw him curled up in his kiddie sheets and with a bunch of plush and plastic toys crowding him, and I got the impression that he looked more restful than he had the night before.
Tess was a tonic all around.
I sent Jules home for the night and saw her out, giving her a breather to catch up with her life after she’d been drafted in all weekend. Then I ordered a club sandwich from room service, relieved the minibar of a couple of beers, handed one to Tess, and hit the couch with her.
I gave her the short version of my day while wolfing down the club, filling her in about what we’d discovered at the clubhouse while leaving out the gorier details. Telling her about my days always helped in that the storytelling exercise allowed me to step back and look at what was going on from a broader, clearer perspective. It also highlighted the questions that were key to figuring out what was going on.
Questions like, why were they following me? Why did they take Scrape and not shoot him on the spot? The one that trumped them all, of course, was, who killed the bikers? Was it someone who had hired them to come after Michelle and/or whoever was being held in the basement, or were the killings unrelated? Timing, and my gut, suggested the former, and that’s what I was going with. So the question, beyond the who, was why? Did they get greedy and fall out over the money? Had they become a liability to whoever hired them, and if so, why? Did they mess up—in which case, was killing Michelle a mistake? But then again, maybe they didn’t know she was dead. Then I thought, maybe their employer felt they’d outlived their usefulness—given that they had a tail on me yesterday, they clearly didn’t have what they were after. Maybe whoever it was had decided to take matters into his own hands. Which, given what Eli Walker went through, wasn’t a reassuring thought.
Tess then took over and told me about her day, and I let my mind throttle back to idling speed and just glide along as I listened to her voice and watched her face light up with animation. Then her face crumpled up with that inquisitive look that I had a real love-hate relationship with—love, because being doggedly inquisitive was part of the allure of Tess Chaykin, and hate because, well, it usually meant trouble—and she got off the couch and went into the bedroom and came back with a few sheets of paper that she showed me, drawings she said she’d found on Michelle’s desk, among her papers.
“Alex’s?” I asked.
“Yeah, must be. They’re similar in style to others at the house.”
I flicked through them. Not to put too much of a Louis C.K. spin on it, but yeah, they were cute, but that was pretty much it as far as I was concerned. Then, animated Tess came to the forefront and took over.
She pulled one of them out and put it on top of the others. “What do you see?”
I struggled a bit. “Two vaguely human-like figures. Or aliens maybe?”
She flashed me the look. “People, doofus. Two people. And I think this one’s Alex,” she said, pointing at the one on the right. “This thing, in his hand. That’s his Ben toy, his favorite. He asked me to bring it back from the house.”
I couldn’t see it. “Did you ask him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
The nose crinkled. Again, part of the allure. “It’s not a happy drawing.”
“Not a happy drawing. Why, because there aren’t any rainbows and butterflies in it?”
I do love the winding up part.
“Look at his face,” she insisted. “See the open mouth, the big eyes. It looks to me like he’s scared. And this guy, facing him. The dark clothes. Something in his hand.”
“Voldemort? Oops. Forgot. Not supposed to say it, right?”
The look again, only cranked up to eleven. Yes, this is our foreplay. Sad, but, hey, it works.
“I’m serious. I think there’s something there. Maybe a gun.”
I gave it another glance. It could be a gun. Then again, it could be pretty much anything you wanted it to be, given that the blob-like entity holding it was so far removed from what humans really look like, it made Picasso’s figures look like Normal Rockwell’s.
“Kids play soldier and cowboy and alien hunter all the time; that’s what boys do. So even if it is him . . . maybe that’s just him and something from some cartoon show or a friend of his, who knows. Could be anything.”
“So why was it on Michelle’s desk, among her papers, not on the kitchen wall or in his bedroom like the others?”
I didn’t have an answer for that—or, rather, I had way too many answers to that. Also, my brain was pretty much maxed out by real life. The fanciful flights of Alex’s imagination, sweet and charming as they were, would have to wait.
“I have no idea,” I simply replied, taking the drawings out of her hand and setting them down on the coffee table. I rolled over and crowded her against the back of the couch, and kissed her hungrily. Then I remembered where we were and pulled back. I stood up and held out my hand to her.
“Why don’t we discuss this in my office?”
As Tess followed Reilly into the bedroom, she couldn’t stop thinking about the drawing.
Maybe Reilly was right. Maybe she was reading way too much into it.
Problem was, the annoying little curiosity demon that lurked in the dark recesses of her mind was all restless and clamoring for her attention.
The demon was still bouncing around inside her as she locked the door behind her and felt Reilly turn her around and pin her against the wall. It definitely wasn’t on her mind for the next hour or so, but after that, as she fell asleep in his arms, it was back, front and center, running amok and demanding an audience.
28
Farther up the coast, a very different kind of demon was hurtling across an entirely different landscape.
Navarro was back at the secluded beachfront villa in Del Mar, sitting cross-legged on a polished teak deck beyond the pool house. The sea was a stone’s throw away directly in front of him and the low moon was bearing down on him like an interrogator’s spotlight as he just sat there, quiet and serene—on the outside, that is.
Inside, things were radically different.
He’d been at it for over an hour, sailing through tunnels of fire and abysses of endless darkness, diving and soaring and spinning through kaleidoscopes of color and fields of surreal visions from his past and his future.
He’d done it before, of course.
Many times.
For those who weren’t accustomed to it or who didn’t know how to tame it, the brown, sludgy concoction he’d ingested could have disastrous consequences, both immediate—vomiting, pissing on themselves, an utter conviction that they were dying, screaming and begging to be saved from a terror that seems unending—and longer term. But not for Navarro. He knew what he was doing.
He’d first taken this particular psychoactive brew in the highlands of Peru, long ago, and had been coached through its usage by a blind shaman. The lucidity it instilled in him was overwhelming at first, but he’d learned to focus it, and with each use it grew more effective.