“Probably.”
When she lowered her hand, four strokes of white remained on her skin where her fingers had been. “Do you feel like a hypocrite?”
He tried to gauge her anger by reading her eyes. “Yes. But I’d rather try to be right than consistent.” The reason he felt as if he hadn’t slept in days, he realized, was that he hadn’t. He slid his hand into the empty pocket of his hip holster; he’d put the holster back on during the drive over.
Dray smiled the kind of smile that said nothing was funny. “Fowler worked on a ranch growing up, in Montana. There was a job, he said, on the slaughterhouse killing floor-a guy had to stun the cows with a prod, then cut their throats.” She leaned forward on the table. “They had to rotate the job every Monday. Not because it was tough to live with. Because the men started liking it too much. They wanted their turn.”
“You’re saying Robert and Mitchell got a taste of something they liked?”
“I’m saying release comes in a lot of flavors, and most of them are addictive.”
They studied the puddle of coffee on the linoleum.
Tim cleared his throat. “I need my gun.”
“Your gun,” she said, as if she were unfamiliar with the word. She rose and headed down the hall to the bedroom. Tim heard the chuck of the gun safe unlocking, and then she returned and set his. 357 on the table between them as if she were up for a nice, casual game of Russian roulette.
He placed the safety-deposit key from Kindell’s case binder on the table and slid it over to Dray. “I’m not going to have time to pursue this right now. And even if I did find which box this key fit, I couldn’t get at the contents without a subpoena.”
She picked up the key and clenched it in a fist. “It’s just legwork. I’ll figure out which bank, go in at lunchtime in the uniform when the managers are on break, flash badge, intimidate a junior banker into opening up.” She nodded once, gravely. “You do what you have to do.”
Tim felt the need to convince, to justify. “If Robert and Mitchell get on this spree,” he said, “who knows when it’ll end. I can’t sit in a jail cell and let it go down.”
“You can’t play Lone Ranger-hero either. Not in good conscience.”
“I won’t. I’ll keep disseminating information through Bear so the service and local PD will have as much as I do. Given my responsibility for this mess, I don’t mind being the one on the line, in the crosshairs.”
“Bear can handle it. The marshals, LAPD-they can track these guys down.”
“Not like I can.”
“True,” she said. “True.” She let out a sigh, angling it up so it puffed out her bangs. She glanced at the pistol, then at him, then away. “You have no authority behind you, Tim. No sanction of the U.S. Marshals, no weight of the Commission. It’s just you now.” She looked up from the coffee-cup fragments, her face holding equal parts concern and daring. “Can you be your own judge and jury?”
He took his gun from the table and holstered it on his way out.
34
TIM got to Yamashiro a full hour early and surveilled it as best he could, in case Bear was planning to spring a trap. Rather than taking the winding, no-options road up the hill to the restaurant, Tim squeezed his car into an out-of-sight meter between two preposterously large SUVs down on Hollywood Boulevard. He checked the area in a closing spiral, finally walking up the steep drive and drawing strange looks from the valets who had no doubt never seen anyone arrive at the hilltop restaurant by foot.
As always he was greeted warmly by Kose Nagura and whisked to his and Bear’s usual table overlooking the hillside Japanese gardens and the Strip below. After the waiter came by and deposited two lemonades, Tim withdrew a tiny brown bottle, released a thin stream into Bear’s drink, and gave it a swirl with a chopstick.
Bear arrived at five-thirty on the button, sliding into the seat opposite Tim and gripping the small tabletop at both sides like a giant serving platter. “You’d better give me some answers pronto here, bud, because I’m not liking what’s adding up.”
“You have the targets under protection?”
Bear spoke slowly, as if this alone held back his growing anger and unease. “We got Dobbins in protective custody. Rhythm and Bowrick we can’t seem to find. You want to tell me what the fuck’s going on?”
“You see Rayner’s?”
“Came straight from there. As ugly as you promised. You want to tell me what the fuck is going on?”
The waiter dropped off a complimentary dish of pickled vegetables, and Bear shooed him off without removing his eyes from Tim.
“Do you want to tell me what the fuck is going on?”
A sea of heads took a tennis-match swivel, then went back to talking and dipping toward tweezer-thin lacquered chopsticks. Great drops of perspiration stood out on Bear’s forehead. His face looked weighty, intensely vulnerable. Tim felt like Travis come to shoot Old Yeller.
He took a sip from his glass, braced himself, and began, interrupted only by Bear’s terse dismissals of the oversolicitous waiter. When he finished, Bear cleared his throat, then cleared it again.
Tim said, “Have some lemonade.”
Bear complied. He mopped his brow with a napkin, and it came away dark with sweat. He munched a few bits of pickled vegetable, made a face, and spat them out.
Tim slid a sheet of paper toward him with carefully prepared notes. “These are all the leads I can think of, which are admittedly not many. Get after them. And find Bowrick. And Rhythm.”
“News flash, Rack, but the U.S. Marshals and LAPD have different priorities in the face of all this than running down a guy like Rhythm Jones to tell him his life might be threatened. Guess what? When you push drugs and turn out girls, you’re generally aware people are gunning for you. We’ll visit Dumone ASAP and suss out Rayner’s office. And we’ll send a car by Kindell’s, but I’m with you-if the Mastersons shredded his file, they ain’t interested, and keeping him alive with the secret to Ginny’s death rattling in his misshapen head fucks with you worse and is therefore preferable to them.” He folded Tim’s list into his pocket. “As for the targets, we’ve contacted those we can contact, but we’re gonna focus on finding Eddie Davis and the Mastersons, not them.”
“There’s no difference.”
“You gonna teach me strategy, lawman?”
“There’s a team gunning for Rhythm Jones.”
“Not the whole team, Rack. They’re missing you.” His righteousness was undercut by a piece of spinach clinging to his incisor. Tim gestured and Bear buffed it off with his napkin.
“You’ve known since you heard that taped 911 call what I’ve been doing, Bear.”
Bear looked away, letting out a jerking sigh. “You’ve been as much a father to me as anyone’s ever been-”
“You’re older than me, Bear.”
“I’m talking right now, and you’re listening.” Bear’s anger was working its way into his face, coloring the rims of his eyes, turning his face an unhealthy white. “You were an officer of the federal courts. A law-enforcement agent of the attorney general. This is going to wreck Marshal Tannino. He loves you like family.” Bear’s voice was disdainful but also morose, even sorrowful. He gave off a hurt betrayal, that of an unjustly smacked dog. Tim felt his self-loathing anew in Bear’s expression, and the anger, once present, bled through him until its bearing was unclear.
At the table beside them, two Hollywood agents, dressed like affluent Mormons, talked indecipherable industry babble over sashimi.
“About half a million criminal cases go through the L.A. court systems a year,” Bear continued, his voice rising at a healthy clip. “Half a million. And you found what? Six you didn’t like? So you’re willing to shitcan the system because here and there something don’t work its way through like it should? Jedediah Lane was acquitted by a jury. It was your job to protect people like him. Congratulations. You’ve just added your name to the proud tradition of mob violence. Revenge killings. Street justice. Lynchings.” He was shaking hard enough that he spilled some of his lemonade over his knuckles when he took a sip. “You don’t deserve to call yourself a former deputy.”