It's better than doing nothing.
He wanted a drink. If ever he had a reason to drink, he had one now. How long had it been? How many years?
He was owed a drink.
He laughed at himself, bitterly, and shook his head. Mentally changed the subject.
Suppose Constance had gone voluntarily. Who knew for sure what went on in her head? There was a lot more to her than the California airhead in the pump hairdo and the ankle bracelets and a greater interest in watching Dynasty re-runs than in reading. There had to be so much more under the surface. And in trying to give Constance "her space" all the time, he had maybe lost touch with her completely. They'd talked, they spent time together, but lately it had been superficial. The apparent shallowness of the girl was probably just a result of her being a teenager, with all the stresses of wanting to be liked.
Garner, himself, in high school, had been the school nonconformist, had worked strenuously on not being liked. Had been borderline pathological in his insistence on autonomy. Constance wanted to belong and his stupid prejudice had made him perceive that as shallow, kneejerk conformity. When in fact it was just healthy, human nature. Something the misfit in Garner was never comfortable with.
He ached, thinking about it. He'd lost her. It was easy to hate the bastard who'd taken her. It felt better to lay it all on the prick in the Porsche.
She hadn't run away. He just couldn't believe it. He knew – he knew – that she had been taken.
For no particular reason, he remembered when she was a toddler, the first time he'd taken her into a wading pool, a little plastic pool with the Flintstones in their caveman swimming togs printed all over it, the blue water a foot deep, and she'd been scared of the little pool at first. And why shouldn't she be? A toddler could drown in a foot of water, if she fell face down and panicked. If her Dad didn't watch over her all the time…
The guy might have his hands on her, right now.
To keep from screaming, Garner began a marathon of talking earnestly to God, praying for everything, everyone, as well as for Constance; for himself, he begged for strength and guidance and patience.
It took him another twenty minutes to get around that fucking truck.
Culver City, Los Angeles
"Where the hell did you get that?" Jeff asked, sitting at his breakfast bar next to Prentice. "Isn't it illegal for you to have that shit?"
"Maybe," Prentice said, distractedly, running his finger down the scribbled doctors' evaluations on the photocopies he'd fanned out on the table, "but I was married to her, right?"
"You bribe somebody?"
"Desk nurse. Gave him a hundred bucks which probably went to crack cocaine, from the look of him. It's pretty scary, what I hear about people in hospitals, nurses and doctors and orderlies, using hard drugs. They're gonna be pulling out your organs and selling them on the blackmarket to get drug money or something… Anyway, yeah, the guy photocopied Amy's files…" He tapped his finger on one copy-faded line. "Check it out."
Instead, Jeff got up to make capuccino. He had an espresso machine and a milk-steamer. He was going to be buying a house soon. Prentice felt resentment and jealousy chasing tails through him, and he stuffed it away, concentrated on the admissions form, reading aloud to Jeff. "Patient repeats certain phrases at intervals, eg: The Morman won't let me come home… patient is frequently labile…" Blah blah blah, the usual psychoguff… But check that out: 'The Morman'."
"The Morman?" Jeff said, over the hissing of the steamer. "Like… The More Man, you mean?"
"It says 'the Morman'. But yeah. She probably was saying, The More Man. Like Lonny said." Prentice waited for Jeff to react.
Bingo. Jeff turned, stared at him. "Come on. Mitch and Amy hooked up with the same guy? Bullshit."
"Hey – they both mutilated themselves, right? More or less the same way." Prentice smiled in quiet triumph. "I went to the Pinkertons, I was thinking of hiring them to investigate the whole shebang, but they're too fucking expensive. But – they do traces on credit cards and stuff for a pretty reasonable fee. So I had 'em trace the account she had that Gold Card on – it came from Sam Denver."
"You're shitting me!"
"You know, that's a revolting expression. No, I'm not 'shitting you'."
"Who are you, Miss Manners? Listen, bro – let's go out to the Ranch. No more talking about it, let's do it. Denver's ranch. See if we can find Mitch. I mean, right fucking now. Just look into it. If it doesn't pan out, we go to the cops."
"Just go out there? Just us?"
"Hey – chances are the Denvers are like my old man used to say about spiders: 'They're more scared of you than you are of them.' They won't want any trouble." He sipped his capuccino. Sprinkled more chocolate on the foam. "And I got a gun, bro. I got a bunch a guns. I got a fuckin. 357, they want to play games – "
'You been playing paintball too often, man. Spend too much time writing action pictures. Dirty Harry 's a fantasy, Jeff. But yeah. Let's go check it out. Only I want my capuccino first, with extra chocolate."
Near Malibu
Jeff was driving like a fucking lunatic, Prentice thought. There was a slate of thin cloud over the sky, but it was hot, the light suffused with an eerie sameness over the dry hills, the manzanita and stunted pine and purplish underbrush, the punky stands of yucca spears – all of it sometimes broken up by improbable squares of lushly green, manicured lawn where an irrigated estate or gated cluster of luxury condos wedged in between hills.
The Cabriolet made a razzing sound as it attacked the curves, fishtailing from time to time. Maybe Jeff's way of working up his nerve for the confrontation…
They had directions from Jeff's agent, who used to come out here, years earlier. But Jeff almost missed the dirt road. They were supposed to look for a redwood mailbox on a big, four sided post made of smooth quartz river stones. They saw the post at the last moment – Prentice spotted it and stamped an imaginary brake, yelling, "Shit – there it is!"
Jeff hit the brake and the tyres made crooked marks on the cracked white highway, Prentice grabbing the dashboard to keep from slamming his head into the windshield. "Coulda told me sooner," Jeff muttered.
"Not at those speeds, A.J. Foyt."
They backed up, turned onto the dirt road. There was a little gravel left in its deeper ruts. Jeff paused to look at the stone post. It was almost hidden in high fiddlehead ferns and sage. The wooden mailbox was gone. On the concrete post, the rounded quartz stones glowed faintly in the sunlight.
"Gotta be it," Jeff said. "They really let it go to seed." The car made a noise like a trumpeting baby elephant as he changed gears. They gunned up the road, pluming dust, tailbones banging on the seat springs as the car jounced in the ruts. The trees got higher nearer the top of the hill; there were hoary palm trees, here, transplanted long ago, looking over the shoulders of mistletoe-darkened oaks. Another curve and they came to a high, dust-coated hurricane fence, with a heavily padlocked gate made of the same stuff. Ten yards beyond it was a stone fence and a black, wrought iron gate figured with rusting cherubims holding a bullet-pocked sign that had once said, Welcome. Over the cherubims was a wrought-iron figure of two crossed skeleton keys. The Doublekey Ranch.
Jeff pulled up in the shade of an overhanging bower of roses. Big roses, so red they were almost black. Looking closer, as the dust cloud parted around them, Prentice saw that the roses were overgrown up a dead oak tree; its trunk and lower branches a black, warped skeleton for the fleshy roses.
From the midst of the rose bush came a wet, throaty snarling. No. It wasn't from the bush – why had he thought it was? It was coming from beyond the hurricane fence. Two Dobermans with spiked collars were running alongside the fence, snarling, teeth bared. They jumped at the fence, making it ring like chain mail, throwing their full bodies against it; shaking dust loose with each clank and making both Prentice and Jeff twitch back in their seats.