I was hoping he was making another trip through Taco Bell, since my stomach was growling and I was in the mood for Mexican food, but instead he headed down towards the freeway.
I thought that maybe he’d finally decided to rejoin the world again.
Traffic was light, so I stayed about four cars behind him. I wasn’t worried about losing him, I could see the top of his enormous Range Rover from a block away.
He drove down to the freeway overpass that led to Old Town Camarillo, so I figured we were making a visit to the outlet mall, probably to Ralph Lauren, judging by what I’d seen of Cyril’s wardrobe. It was a good sign. If he was ready to shop, he was ready to forget.
But then I saw the cars in front of me suddenly brake, and was overcome with a horrible sense of déjà vu. I stopped the car, jumped out, and ran towards the overpass, knowing what I’d see before I saw it.
Cyril Parkus stood on the guardrail over the freeway, his head turned towards the street, waiting for me to show up.
He knew I’d be there, just like Lauren knew.
And when he saw me, he smiled and looked down at the traffic as if contemplating a jump into a tranquil pool.
I yelled his name, and it was still echoing in the air when Cyril simply stepped off the rail, his arms at his sides, his body perfectly straight.
I reached the rail in time to see the massive pile-up below, cars careening across the roadway like pinballs, smashing into one another, dragging pieces of Cyril’s body across the asphalt until he was lost amidst the carnage.
He’d told me in the cabin that he was going to do this, but I was so busy living out my private eye fantasy, so busy trying to plug him into the role of the big, rich, bad ugly, I didn’t hear what he said.
“I don’t care about anything now that she’s gone . . .”
The tragedy was complete now, sparing no one. Lauren, Cyril, and Arlo were all dead. There was no wrong that had been righted. There was no bad guy on his way to life in the big house. There was no happy client to thank me for what I’d done.
In over two hundred episodes, nothing like this had ever happened to Joe Mannix.
No one was following the rules.
I turned and walked back towards my car against the frantic tide of people rushing off the street and out of their cars to see what happened. When I was passed them, I saw one person standing on the sidewalk in front of my car, a baseball bat resting on his shoulder.
“Did Parkus kill my brother?” Little Billy asked.
I nodded. Some private eye I was. He must have been following me all week, and I never once saw him. Then again, I never thought to look.
“He tied Arlo to a boat anchor and dropped him in the middle of the lake,” I said, suddenly in the mood for honesty.
Little Billy took the news emotionlessly, as if I’d just told him about the weather.
“Could you have stopped him?” he asked.
“No more than I could have stopped this,” I replied.
Little Billy seemed to accept that and let me pass. I was about to get in the car, but then I looked back at him standing there, and felt the pain that he wasn’t showing.
The first instant I saw him, back in Deerlick, I assigned him his clichéd role in my detective story, just as I did with everybody else. He was the mindless, violent thug. The bone-breaker. One of the bad guys. Now I saw a guy whose only fault was that he cared about his brother and I didn’t.
“If you want to meet me back at my place, I’ll buy you another Dr Pepper and tell you everything I know,” I said.
Little Billy nodded.
We both became aware of the sirens approaching, and neither one of us wanted to be here when the police showed up. I tossed him the keys to my apartment.
“I have to stop on the way and pick up my girlfriend at work,” I added. “Make yourself at home.”
I got into my car and watched him go in my rearview mirror.
He walked over to a rusted-out pickup truck a couple cars behind me. He’d driven all the way down here in that junker to find out the truth.
His search had ended the way mine began.
I realized then that maybe we had more in common with each other than either of us knew. Maybe we’d get the chance to find out how much. Or maybe he’d just beat me to death with his bat. I didn’t know, and I didn’t particularly care. I was going with my gut.
As I drove back towards LA, I threw my Travis McGee books out the window. The guy didn’t know shit about being a private eye.
THE END
About Lee Goldberg
Table of Contents
DISINTEGRATION
By Scott Nicholson
Scott Nicholson’s Amazon Author Central page
About the Author
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
Jacob Wells smelled smoke seventeen seconds before hell opened its door.
The Appalachian night was just cool enough to require a quilt on top of the bedspread, and he’d sought Renee’s body heat beneath the sheet. One of his wife’s legs was tangled in his, the nail of her big toe digging into his ankle. The weight of her head pressed into that familiar space above his armpit and her hair spilled across his shoulder. Drowsy, he tried to remember where he was, then saw the red glaring numbers. 1:14.
The alarm was set for six a.m., an ugly hour that always came too soon. Jacob rarely slept before reaching the long side of midnight. Every night his sleep shrank, his dreams crammed into tighter and darker crevices, his thoughts spiraling like dirty water down a drain. He had failed, and the knowledge had dull teeth that ground him from the guts up.
Tonight, the dream had been of a mirror that he had somehow fallen into, as if it were a silvery, sunlight sea. He tried to drag himself out, because he couldn’t breathe. When he reached out of the mirror, though, his reflection was on the other side, pushing him back down. Desperate, he grabbed his reflection and pulled it into the mirror with him, and they wrestled in that bottomless, soundless void, joining into one writhing mass that sank and sank ever further from the light.
His eyes snapped open to the black sheet of the ceiling. The pillow was damp at his neck. A breeze blew from somewhere, a crack in the door or window, carrying the March odors of mud and daffodils. Renee stirred beside him, nudging him with a sleepy elbow. Her snores were soft and feminine.
Her scent flooded his nostrils, meadow shampoo and the lingering tang of their lovemaking. She had always been clean, a chronic neat freak, almost to the point of obsession. She loathed perfume, though, and was comfortable with her own natural odors. That was one of Jacob’s favorite things about her. He took another sniff, as if he could carry its memory back into his dreams to give him comfort.
The sniff brought unease instead of comfort. Something was out of place in the too-thick air. Jacob pulled himself from drowsiness. No mistake.
Smoke.
They’d had candles on the nightstand, a ritual dating back to their initial shy fumbling in college when soft light hid minor flaws and made pupils attractively large. But the candles were long cold, and this aroma wasn’t thick and waxy.
It had a chemical sting, and beneath that, the brusque body of burning wood.
Jacob swam the rest of the way up from the waters of half-sleep and pushed Renee’s leg away. Maybe one of the neighbors was burning brush. It was the time of year for yard work, when leaves and ice-damaged branches were raked into large piles in that first spring bloom of homeowner energy. But who would start a brush fire an hour after midnight?
Renee mumbled into the pillows where her face had fallen. Jacob swung his legs over the side of the bed, squeaking the springs. He switched on the bedside lamp. On the nightstand, shielded by a slight sheen of dust, was a framed photograph of Mattie. Except for the crooked primary teeth in her grin, she looked like a miniature of Renee—sea-green eyes, reddish-blond hair, a faint splash of freckles on the swells of her cheeks. Jacob looked at the trusting face.