He was pulling ammo from the gun safe into a backpack when he became aware of Dray in the doorway. The roll of cash he’d wedged in the back pocket of his jeans. Dray studied his hands, the ammo.
“Take your bulletproof vest,” she said.
“It’ll slow me down.”
“May you die and come back a woman in Afghanistan.”
He stood, slinging the backpack over one shoulder. He started out, but she shifted in the doorway, blocking him. Her arms were spread, clutching the jamb on either side, the sudden proximity of her face, her chest, recalling the moment before a hug. He could smell her jasmine lotion, could feel the heat coming off her flushed cheek. If he’d turned his head, his lips would have brushed against hers.
“You’re taking the fucking vest,” she said. “I’m not asking.”
42
WHEN TIM TURNED off Grimes Canyon Road onto the snaking drive to the burned-down house, he felt a thrumming start in the void where his stomach should have been. He pulled to a stop on the overgrown concrete foundation where the house used to stand, dead weeds crackling beneath the wheels.
Ahead, the stand-alone garage stood at the base of the small eucalyptus grove. At night it conveyed a sort of dilapidated grandeur, like a forsaken Southern mansion, but in the bright and unflinching daylight, it looked pathetic and distinctly unmenacing. Tim pulled on his gloves, his bulletproof vest, then approached.
The dirt-clouded windows had grown almost opaque. The garage door creaked up on rusty coils. The first thing that struck him was the odor, damp and dirty, the smell of water left stagnant and then drained. The busted water pipe had deposited swirls of silt on the greasy concrete floor.
Same ratty couch. Same hole in the far wall, no longer plugged by Ginny’s underwear. Same enveloping dankness.
But no Kindell.
The side table had been knocked over, the cheap particleboard splintered down the middle, throwing up spikes of wood. One of the couch’s cushions had been upended, the fabric split across the front like a burst seam. Crusty yellow stuffing protruded from the rip. The lamp lay shattered on the floor, the bare lightbulb still miraculously intact.
The mark of a brief struggle.
Tim placed his gloved fingertips on a dark spot on the couch, then smeared the moisture off the leather onto the white Sheetrock of the rear wall so he could discern its true color. Blood red.
A carton of milk lay on its side on the counter, a thread-thin tendril of fluid leaking from the closed spout. Tim righted the carton. Almost empty. He stared at the pool of milk on the floor, about four feet in diameter. He watched its drowsy expansion, gauged it had been at it for at least half an hour.
They’d taken Kindell somewhere. If they were merely going to kill him, they would have done it here. Isolated, quiet, rural. The stand of eucalyptus would have gone a long way toward stifling a bullet’s report.
There was another plan in the works.
As Tim headed out, a white seam in the freshly exposed couch-cushion stuffing caught his eye. He walked over and tugged on it. His daughter’s sock emerged.
A tiny thing, not six inches heel to toe, a ring of circus-color polka dots around the top. His daughter’s sock. Stowed away in a ripped cushion like a dirty magazine, a bag of pot, a wad of cash. In this place.
His legs were trembling, so he sat down on the couch, gripping the sock in both hands, thumbs pressed into the fabric. The small room did a drunken tilt, a jumble of sensations pressing in on him. A waft of paint thinner. Milk dripping from the counter. A tingling in the scab over his eye. The smell of the embalming table, of what had remained of his daughter at the end.
He pressed his hand to his forehead, and it came away moist. His knees shook, both of them, uncontrollably. He tried to stand but could not find the strength in his legs, so he sat again, clutching his daughter’s sock, shaking not with rage but with an unmitigated longing to hold his daughter, a longing that ran deeper than sorrow or even pain. He had not been braced, had not anticipated the need to shield these vulnerabilities, and the tiny white sock with its foolish dots had soared right through his fissures and struck him deep.
After ten minutes or thirty, he made it out into the pounding sun, across the scorching foundation to his car. He sat for a moment, trying to even out his breathing.
He had some trouble getting the key into the slot. He turned over the engine and drove off.
On the freeway he picked up the pace, accelerating until the speedometer pushed ninety, putting miles between himself and the killer’s shack. Both windows down, air conditioner blasting. It wasn’t until he roared past the First Street exit that his breathing returned to normal.
He pulled over and called Dray, reaching her at the station.
“They took Kindell.”
The pause seemed to stretch out forever, then it stretched some more.
Her laugh, when it came, sounded like a cough. “What are they doing with him?”
“I don’t know. If I could just get a lock on one of their residences.”
“Big ‘if.’”
“I was almost there. I can’t believe the Stork’s car didn’t pan out. If the damn footage was clearer, I could have gotten the plate number.”
“Wait a minute. Footage. What footage?”
“The security recording. I found his car on a security tape I took from a video store.”
“Was it day or night? When the footage was shot?”
“Night.”
“What was the lighting?”
“What?”
“The lighting. How did you see the car?”
“I don’t know. A streetlight, I think. Why does this matter?”
“Because, genius, if the streetlight was sodium-arc, it would make a blue car look black on film.”
Tim’s mouth moved, but nothing came out.
“Hello? Are you there?”
“How do you know that?”
“Security-systems Secret Service course at Beltville last spring. Did you forget that in addition to being a domestic goddess, I’m a highly proficient investigator?”
“You got half of that right.”
“Go check the streetlight. I’ll start running the blue PT Cruisers, call me with the confirm.”
“I’m on my way.”
•Fortunately, the streetlight was offset a good ten feet from the Cinsational Video front door, so Tim could stand gawking up at it without risking being spotted by the kid he’d robbed Saturday morning. He hadn’t considered the fact that it was difficult if not impossible to determine whether a streetlight housed a sodium-arc lamp during the day, when it was shut off. He’d pulled on a zippered jacket to hide his bulletproof vest, but his reflection in a passing bus’s window showed he’d succeeded only in making himself look conspicuous and fat.
A kid in a black hooded sweatshirt zipped past him on a skate-board, regarding him curiously. Tim waited for him to round the corner, then withdrew his. 357, cocked it, and shot out the light. A puff of white powder emerged as the gas released, and then shards of glass tinkled on the sidewalk.
Tim got back into his car and drove away, already dialing.
Dray picked up on the first ring.
“Yeah, it’s sodium-arc all right.”
•Tim waited patiently in a corner booth at Denny’s, a Grand Slam breakfast sweating on the plate in front of him, though it was dinner-time. He scanned the front page of a discarded Sunday paper-MARSHAL VOWS TO STOP VIGILANTE THREE-picking up misleading background information on the players. A crime hot line had been established for phone-in tips. An LAPD spokesperson believed that the Mastersons financed the operations, using the money they’d received as part of their considerable settlement from the tabloid that had published the crime-scene photos of their murdered sister.
Page two reported on a Baltimore car salesman who, inspired by the Lane and Debuffier executions, had shot two men attempting to hold him up. One of the muggers had been seventeen, the other was his fifteen-year-old brother.