As a distraction I went back to the phone to see if there was anything else I could find. The picture section had four files. Over the last year, Amy had developed a weird resistance to photographs. She dealt with them all day at work, of course, glistening product shots and endless casting pictures, but didn’t like being in them or seem to have much enthusiasm for taking them of anyone else. The first picture was the one she had previously used as the general wallpaper on her phone. It showed the two of us, heads together, laughing. I’d taken it with my phone a year and a half ago, at the end of the Santa Monica Pier. It was a good picture, and I didn’t like the fact that she’d evidently stopped using it. The next two were called Photo–76.jpg and Photo–113.jpg. Both were dark and grainy, and on such a small screen I couldn’t make anything out. The final picture was lighter, and while it still looked as if it had been taken in twilight, its subject was more evident. A man’s head and shoulders, shot from a distance of about six feet away. His face was shadowed. He wasn’t looking at the camera but turned away, as if unaware he was being photographed. This picture didn’t seem to have a title as much as an attached message:
Confirmed. Apologies for quality. You’ll be happy, though.
The number it had come from was not the same as that on the text messages. I laid the phone back on the table and took a swallow of beer. Going back to drinking Mack & Jack’s was beginning to seem like a good idea. I knew it wasn’t. I also knew that wasn’t likely to stop me. When the drinks waitress came into view, I looked up at her but then turned back as I heard my phone ring.
I didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?” I said. “Is that you?”
It wasn’t Amy. It was the cabdriver.
chapter
TWELVE
He arrived twenty minutes later. Too-blue jeans, a new three-quarter-length leather jacket. Short hair, sturdy and anonymous bone structure. I’d started to see guys like this arriving in L.A. a year or two before we left. The workhorses of the new millennium, young men who would stack shelves, sell contraband on street corners, toil like dogs in regular modes of employment or smack heads in the dead of night, all with a steady, glacial determination that seemed to elude the local populace.
And, of course, drive cabs. I indicated who I was with an upward nod. He came over and sat on the opposite side of the table, glanced at my beer.
“You want one?”
“Please,” he said.
“But you’re working, right?”
He just looked at me. I held my hand up, got us both a drink. The waitress was fast and had them back by the time I’d lit another cigarette.
When Georj had taken a long swallow, he nodded. “Good,” he said. “So?”
“Thanks for taking the phone to the hotel.”
He shrugged. “Thank you for the money. I think probably it not be there. So?”
“I just wanted to see if you remembered anything else.”
He glanced at his hands like someone used to not remembering things and not remembering them on demand. “I drive all day. All over. They get in, they get out.”
I clicked a couple buttons on my cell phone, held it up to him across the table. “That’s her,” I said.
He leaned forward, peered at the picture on the screen. It was the one that Amy had been using as her background until recently.
“She’s my wife,” I said. “That’s me there with her, right? I’m not a cop. I’m just trying to find her.”
He took the phone from me, angled it against the dim light. “Okay,” he said finally. “I remember.”
My heart started beating faster, but I had many years’ experience of this kind of inquiry. “She’s pretty tall,” I said. “Around five ten?”
He shook his head immediately. “Then not her. Woman I think of, more like five feet and a half feet.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s her.”
He looked at me, raised an eyebrow sardonically. “Not a cop, right. I not Russian either. I from Disney World.”
“You got me. I was once a cop. I’m guessing you’re someone who’s used to talking to the police, too. So let’s not jerk each other around. When did you see her?”
He considered. “Early in the night. Pick up downtown. Drop in Belltown somewhere, I think.”
I shook my head, not knowing where he was talking about. He pointed right. “Up, past fish market. She tip too much, is how I remember.”
Score two for recognizable characteristics. “You recall anything else?”
“Not so much.” He took a cigarette from my pack, lit it. “It was rain. I watch the road. They talk. I—”
“Wait a minute. They?”
“Her, a man.”
My stomach felt sour. “What did the man look like?”
“Suit, I think. Dark hair. I don’t remember.”
“Did they get in the car together?”
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. Just talk, you know.”
“What were they talking about?”
“How do I know? I have radio playing.”
“Come on, Georj. Did they look serious? Were they laughing? What?”
I realized he was staring at me and that my volume level was getting out of control. Took a breath.
“Okay,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry. You picked two people up. Drove them someplace, up in Belltown, wherever. She pays, you drive away. That’s it?”
He swallowed the rest of his beer. He was ready to leave. In desperation I took Amy’s phone from the table. Found the final picture. Passed it over to him.
“Could that have been the man?”
He looked at it for barely a second, shook his head, stood up. “I don’t know. Bad picture. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you. You got a job to go on to?”
He hesitated. “No.”
“You do now.”
I walked behind him into the drizzle. I didn’t even know if the Malo would have any rooms, or if they’d rent one this late to someone like me. But I knew that being in a public place would not be good for me, and the Malo was the last known address I had for Amy, however spurious that had turned out to be.
The driver took a right off First, walking ahead. Why hadn’t he parked directly outside the bar?
“Why didn’t you park directly outside the bar?” I asked truculently. I had begun to slur my words, just a little, and the boundary between the inside and the outside of my head was starting to fade.
“In case police,” he said patiently, not bothering to turn around. “They see from bar to car, not so good.”
I followed him around a couple more corners and suddenly realized we weren’t far from the end of Post Alley. This made me think of Todd Crane. Who had dark hair. Who was the kind of guy who wore suits. He’d seemed convincing in his ignorance of Amy’s whereabouts.
But…
We turned into another side street, narrow and cobbled, lined with the backs of old warehouses, a red cab parked on one side. Georj was twenty or thirty feet ahead of me now, and as he stopped to get his keys out, I saw something.
A couple of figures were approaching from the deep shadows farther up the alley. They were too far away to see clearly at first, but both wore dark clothing and were headed purposefully toward the cab.
“Georj,” I said.
He looked around at me, confused, saw I had started to run. He turned to look back the other way and froze.
The figures were running now, too. Both heading in my direction, evidently having realized I was going to be their first cause of trouble. The men’s faces were pale and calm. One was tall, blond; the other shorter, with red hair. Out of long habit, I reached to my belt, but there was nothing there.