Vaggan switched on the flash and shined it on the man. He was young, maybe thirty, with curly black hair and a mustache. He slept on, snoring lightly. Vaggan extracted his .32, leaned forward, touched him.
The man jerked, stiffened.
"No sound," Vaggan said. He moved the light back so it illuminated the pistol. "No reason in the world for you to get hurt. They don't pay you enough for that."
The guard rolled on his back, eyes wide, staring at the gun barrel. The light reflected from dilated pupils.
"What?" the guard said. He said it in a whisper, back pressed against the mattress. "Who…?"
"You and I have no problem," Vaggan said. "But I've got to talk to Leonard, so I got to tie you up."
"What?" the guard said again.
"You make any trouble, I kill you," Vaggan said. "Noise or trouble and you're dead. Otherwise, no harm done. You just stay tied up for a while. Okay? I'll look in now and then, and if you've tried to get loose, then I have to kill you. You understand that? Do you?"
"Yes," the guard said. He stared at the pistol, and into the light that illuminated it, and above the light, looking for the source of Vaggan's voice.
"On your stomach, now," Vaggan whispered. "Wrists behind you."
Vaggan fished two sets of nylon handcuffs from the jacket. He secured the guard's wrists behind him, then pulled him down the bed by his ankles. He cuffed the ankles together, one foot on each side of the metal bedpost.
The man was shaking, and his skin was wet with perspiration under Vaggan's hand. Vaggan grimaced and wiped his palm against the sheet. This one would never survive, and should never survive. When the missiles came, he would be one of the creeping, crawling multitude of weaklings purged from the living.
"Lift your face," Vaggan whispered. He taped the guard's mouth, winding the adhesive around and around, in quick movements. "My business will take an hour," Vaggan said. "I can tolerate no sound from this room for one hour. If I hear you moving in here, I will simply step inside and kill you. Like this." He pressed the muzzle of the pistol against the skin above the guard's ear. "One shot."
The guard breathed noisily through his nostrils, shuddering. He closed his eyes and turned his face away from the pistol. Vaggan felt an overwhelming sense of repugnance. He wiped his palm against his trouser leg.
Back in the hallway he used up another full minute listening. He could hear the guard breathing, almost gasping, through the door behind him and, from the door at the end of the hall, music. Elton John had been replaced by a feminine voice singing of betrayal and loneliness. He moved to the door and pressed his ear against it. He could hear only the song. He tried the knob. Locked. He extracted the credit card, slid it through the slit, pressed back the tongue, and eased the door a half inch open. His heart was beating hard now, his breathing quick, the sound of blood in his ears. He made sure the pistol was cocked. Then he opened the door.
This room was also lit by moonlight. It shone directly on thin, translucent drapes pulled across a wall of glass—making the drapes luminescent and illuminating a pale carpet and a huge bed. On it two people slept. Jay Leonard lay on his back, right hand dangling, left arm across his face, legs spread. He wore a pajama top, unbuttoned. The other person was a woman, much younger—a brunette curled on her side away from Leonard, the filtered moonlight giving the smooth, bare skin of her buttocks the look of ivory. Vaggan smelled perfume, human sweat, the inevitable dust of the Santa Ana, and the sweet smell of marijuana. The music ended and became the muted voice of the disc jockey, talking about dog food. The radio tuner was built into the headboard of the bed, its dial a bright yellow slit in the dimness. Vaggan wondered how anyone could sleep with a radio on.
In his pocket, he touched the sharp interlocking serrations forming the teeth of the ear tags and found the plier-clamp that would crimp them together. Outside, the Santa Ana rose again, screaming in the moonlight. Vaggan glanced at his watch. Three eighteen. He'd planned for three twenty, and he waited for three twenty.
"Leonard," Vaggan said. "Wake up. I've come to get the money."
When Vaggan got back to his van it was a little after 4 a.m. He stored the plastic garbage bag with the bodies of the dogs in the back, put away his other gear, and then let the van roll quietly back down the street before starting the engine. He ticked off all he'd done, making sure that nothing had been overlooked. After finishing with Leonard, he'd taken the dog's leg and used it and the ice bag of blood to make a crazy pattern of paw prints across the living room carpet and down the hall to Leonard's bedroom. He'd put the dogs' heads, side by side, on the mantel and poured the remainder of the blood over them. He'd called the hospital emergency room to tell them Jay Leonard, the TV talk show host, was on his way and would need attention. Finally he called the city desk of the Times and the night shift of the newsrooms of the three network TV stations. At each place someone was waiting for a call "about three forty-five," just as Vaggan had told them to be.
"I'm the man who called earlier," Vaggan said. "The celebrity I told you about who was going to get hurt tonight is Jay Leonard. He's on his way right now to the emergency room, just like I told you he would be. His girlfriend is driving him. He's got cattle ear tags clamped through both ears, and he'll need a little surgery to get them removed. If you sent a crew there, like I suggested, you should get some good stuff."
And then he told them the motive of this affair—a matter of not paying one's gambling debts. Leonard had been a fellow who didn't believe kneecaps still got broken, but Leonard knew better now, and Leonard was paying up in full, with interest.
Finally, Vaggan added, Leonard had left his house open and the lights on, and if they hurried and got there before the Beverly Hills police got the word, they would find something interesting.
Chapter 14
Chee emerged from sleep abruptly, as was his way, aware first of the alien sheet against his chin, the alien smells, the alien darkness. Then he clicked into place. Los Angeles. A room in Motel 6, West Hollywood. He looked at his watch. Not quite five thirty. The sound of the wind, which had troubled his sleep throughout the night, had diminished now. Chee yawned and stretched. No reason to get up. He had come with a single lead to finding Begay and Margaret Billy Sosi, the Gorman address. That had led nowhere. Beyond that he had nothing but the chance of picking up some trace of the Gorman family or the Turkey Clan. He and Shaw had tried the Los Angeles County Native America Center with no luck at all. The woman who seemed to be in charge was an Eastern Indian, a Seminole, Chee guessed, or Cherokee, or Choctaw, or something like that. Certainly not a Navajo, or any of the southwestern tribes whose facial characteristics were familiar to Chee.
Nor was she particularly helpful. The notion of clans seemed strange to her, and the address of the three Navajos she finally managed to come up with had been dead ends. One was a middle-aged woman of the Standing Rock People, born for the Salt Cedars, another was a younger woman, a Many Goats and Streams Come Together Navajo, and the third, incredible as it seemed to Chee, was a young man who seemed to have no knowledge of his clan relationships. The project had taken hour after hour of fighting traffic on the freeways through the endless sprawl of Los Angeles, hunting through the evening darkness and into the night and getting nothing from it but a list of names of other Navajos who might know somebody in the diminished circle of Ashie Begay's diminished clan. Probably, Chee knew, they wouldn't.
Chee got up and took a shower with the water on low to avoid disturbing his motel neighbors. The shorts and socks he'd rinsed the night before were still damp, reminding him that even with the dry Santa Ana blowing all night there was a lot more humidity on the coast than in the high country. He sat in the clammy shorts, pulling on clinging wet socks, noticing that the light wind he had awakened to had faded into a calm. That meant the Pacific low-pressure area into which the wind had been blowing had moved inland. It would be a day of good weather, he thought, and the thought reminded him of how impressed Mary Landon had been (or pretended to be—it didn't really matter) with his grasp of weather patterns.