Joshua was standing at a polite distance, arms folded, hands flattened and pressed against his biceps. “So what do you think of all this business in the news?”
“I haven’t been watching.”
“The Vigilante Three?”
“I heard something about it on the radio.”
Joshua’s expression changed, and he took a step to the side for a better vantage. “Jesus, your face. What happened?”
“I fell off my bike.”
“Motorcycle?”
“Yeah-it’s fine. Happens all too often. I just gotta clean it out.”
“Let me take a look.”
“No. That’s all right. It’s not pretty.”
“You people always think fags are fragile. You forget we’ve seen it all. The eighties were not a kind decade for us.”
The elevator arrived, and Tim stepped on, pivoting to keep his shoulder out of view.
“Last offer,” Joshua said. “I can give you a ride to the emergency room.”
“No, really. I’m fine.” Tim punched the fourth-floor button, and the doors started to slide shut. “Thanks, though.”
Once in his apartment, he wedged the doorstop back into place to secure the front door and gingerly pulled off his T-shirt. A look in the bathroom mirror confirmed there were no exit wounds; the frags were embedded in the dense ball of muscle composing his anterior deltoid. He popped four Advil, then rotated his arm at the shoulder to ensure that it had full range of motion. It did.
He drew a wet rag across the area to clarify the wounds’ edges, then gritted his teeth and sank the tweezer prongs into the first laceration. They went in a good inch before clicking metal. He withdrew the copper sliver easily. It took some rooting in the second wound before he located the fragment. Because it was irregular, the frag came out slow and rough, tearing flesh on the way. He had to stop twice and wipe his forehead to keep sweat from running into his eyes.
He held the squirt top of a bottle of distilled water inches from his shoulder and squeezed hard, sending a probing jet into the wound to flush any smaller particles.
Repeating the process for the second laceration was predictably more painful.
After irrigation with hydrogen peroxide, the wounds looked like two tiny pink mouths. Feeling Terminator-tough, he regarded his work with a measure of satisfaction before bandaging it.
His face was another matter. The flesh all around his right eye was scraped up, leaving what looked like a bloody pirate patch. Tim had to scour out the dirt and bits of gravel with a washcloth.
After putting on a fresh shirt, he used his new outgoing phone to check his old Nokia voice mail. Dray had left a message saying she was still working the leads, no luck yet. The message’s time stamp reminded him that Bowrick had just thirty-six hours left before the recovery center required a reassessment or put him back out on the street.
Lying back on his bed, he exhaled deeply and let his muscles relax.
The Stork, clearly aware of cell-phone-tracking technology, had probably orchestrated the call from Studio City. With his help, Robert and Mitchell had walked Tim into a well-orchestrated trap. It had not occurred to him what a strong team the three made, even without him-the Mastersons providing operational muscle and strategy while the Stork played technological puppet master.
He vowed not to underestimate them again.
He popped four more Advil and fell into a deep, sound sleep-no nightmares, no images of Ginny, no thoughts of Dray, just a blank white corridor of unthought. He woke abruptly after nightfall, sweaty and still veiled in a dream haze. The room was dark, the alley below surprisingly peaceful. The needling question as to what had awaked him sharply from so deep a slumber helped clear his head. His shoulder pulsed impatiently, eager to heal.
He sat up in bed, his legs hanging off the mattress in front of him. He felt constrained in his clothes, which had sleep-shifted around him. His watch showed 9:13 P.M. He stood and went to the window. At the end of the alley, a dark car waited, visible through the steam of the broken pipe. The passenger door opened, but no dome light went on.
Bad news.
Tim turned back, facing the door across his dark apartment.
The slightest scuffling sound in the hall. The pinpoint scratch of dog nails against floor.
Tim thought, How?
His eyes tracked down to the doorstop wedged hard beneath the door, then up to the decoy knob that he’d detached completely from the surrounding jamb. With excruciating slowness, he reached behind him, slid the window open.
A shattering impact shook the apartment. The entire doorknob, propelled by an unseen battering ram, flew from the frame, striking the floor once and smashing into the wall beside Tim. The door itself, pinned by the doorstop, bent in but did not swing open.
From the flurry of shouting, Tim could somehow discern distinct voices-Bear and Maybeck, Denley and Miller. He leapt through the window onto the fire escape as the door splintered and gave way behind him. Immediately the alley below lit with headlights-the car he’d spotted before and another at the south end. As he flew down the ladder, they screeched forward, closing on the fire escape from either side.
The hammering of boots through his apartment above seemed to vibrate the entire building. The deputies were yelling “Clear” as he hit the third landing, and then he could make out Bear’s deep rumble of a voice hurling profanities. Ignoring his throbbing shoulder, Tim slid down the ladder to the second landing. Two spotlights angled up from the cars in the alley blanketed him, moving with him. Raising an arm to shield his eyes, he ran to the outfacing bathroom window, the flimsy landing shaking with his steps. It was still screenless, still inched open.
He threw it open and, using the landing overhead, swung himself in. He hit the toilet hard. When he shoved out through the bathroom door, two bodies jerked upright in bed, startled faces and flying paperbacks bathed in the light of dueling reading lamps. He was through the living room in a flash and out into the hall.
Flashing blue and red reflected in the windows at either end of the corridor-LAPD backup. The door to Room 213 was unlocked, as he’d left it. He sprinted through the apartment, out the living-room window onto the fire escape. The alley on this side of the building was too narrow to accommodate a car, but sure enough a vehicle was waiting thirty yards down on the main street. Good work, Thomas and Freed.
He slid down the ladder and hung from the bottom rung, his shoulder screaming, his feet dangling a few inches from the ground. He dropped and hit the ground running. Down the alley two car doors opened and closed, and for a brief moment he and Thomas and Freed were sprinting directly at each other. In the lead, Thomas stopped, raising his shotgun. Freed pulled up at his side as Tim froze, hands half spread, staring down the bore from about thirty yards. Water dripped from a leaky pipe to Tim’s left. Freed’s head rotated slightly, just enough for his eyes to fall on Thomas, questioning, then Tim sprang forward, running toward them again. Thomas shouted, thighs flexing, shotgun firming at his shoulder but not firing.
Tim banked hard down the alley ten yards north of the fire escape and hurtled forward over boxes and fences with a nearly out-of-control momentum, the noise of his pursuers following him. After two forced turns, he came out on Third, only a half block from his building, practically skidding to halt himself. He flagged a cab and ducked into the backseat. An opera singer wailed from both speakers, her voice piercing and wobbly.