I reached down to give the Rott a reassuring pat. He trembled violently, and his throat squeezed out a thin, anxious whine. I looked down to see what was wrong. He was pissing the rug.
“I’m so happy you brought Dog back to us,” the voice said.
I glanced up to the face of the man who had shot me on the hill behind Angela Doubleday’s estate, his gelled hair and constant two-day stubble dark contrast to his medical whites. I pulled the Rott’s leash and stepped back. The front door jerked open behind me and before I could turn to confront whoever came through it something hard streaked against the side of my head. I stumbled over an end chair and struck the carpet awkwardly, head to shoulder, bringing the chair down with me. The two men moved as a team, like coyotes bringing down prey. I rolled to my stomach and kicked forward, but the weight of the man behind hit my back, knocking the air from my lungs. Cotton padding flashed before my eyes to clamp my mouth and it was then that I thought, too late, to scream. The air tasted of alcohol and ether. I tried to shake free my mouth. A forearm pinned my head to the floor. I willed myself not to breathe, knowing that when I did, I’d get a lung full of chloroform. In the very corner of the room, the Rott watched, trembling with terror. I blinked at him, trying to convey’that it was all right, I didn’t blame him for failing to protect me, and then everything else was all right, too; the weight on my back lightened, the forearm pinning my head to the floor turned to a caress, and I was floating down the hall, the ceiling a tunnel of gray fog. A chair rose from the floor to enfold me, the straps that bound my wrists to the armrests of no greater concern than gentle hands holding mine. Voices fluttered past like rustling leaves, and then the pain began, a dull throb at the back of my head and sharper stabs, behind the eyes, from the dissipating chloroform. I snatched at the words as they rippled by and caught and held two of them, “nitrous” and “oxide.” The reply was incomprehensible, something about talk. And then I heard a sentence quite clearly, “We can take them out in the desert.”
“We have the tools here,” another voice said. “We have time.”
Take what out, I wondered, and time for what?
The face of the gray-haired one stared down at me, his eyes warm with concern but no less predatory. “Hi there,” he said. “Sorry about all this. It’s not my style to be so, I dunno, brutal? Right. Brutal. Do you feel okay? We didn’t hurt you?”
I stared at him.
He smiled, the roguish curve of his lips confident of their power to charm. “I’m happy that you’re okay. We didn’t expect you to fight so hard. But I want to assure you, regardless of the surroundings, we’re not interested in pain. We don’t want to hurt you. We’re going to ask you some questions. After you answer them, we’ll give you a little gas, to help you sleep, and we’ll go away.”
I tried to rub my eyes and couldn’t, something catching my wrists. I lay in a dental chair, my wrists bound to the armrests. I stretched my legs. My ankles were bound, too. I struggled to animate my tongue, and when it failed to respond, I nodded.
“We’ll start with an easy one,” he said, gently stroking my forehead. “The day you were on the hill behind Angela Doubleday’s house, did you see anyone?”
I glanced beside his shoulder, where his brother examined probes, mirrors, and curettes, one by one. The grip of a .38 revolver jutted obscenely from the drawstring of his trousers.
“You saw my brother. Good. And?”
I stared at him.
“And me?”
I nodded.
“How many rolls of film did you take?”
I moved my lips, and the word “one” came out.
“Was that roll in the camera when my brother found you?”
I nodded.
“That roll contained all the pictures you took of us?”
I nodded again.
“You didn’t, for example, shoot two rolls and put one in your pocket or camera bag?”
I shook my head.
He gave me a friendly pat on my shoulder, said, “Good, we really appreciate your honesty. Can we assume that you’re the source behind the recent articles in the tabloid press?”
“My job,” I said.
“How did you discover our names?”
“Computer. Mug shot on a website.”
“Clever. That was really clever.”
“Really fucking inconvenient,” his brother said, and the probe he’d been holding clattered onto the tray like an exclamation point.
“We have to take the bad with the good, and think how much good she did for us,” the gray-haired one said. Ray, that was his name, Ray Belgard. He stroked my brow again, and this time, my reactions returned to normal; I flinched. “When you were arrested for setting the fire, that was good for us. We owe you a big favor for that one. I mean, wow, we really appreciate it. But this new story, it’s not good for us, not good for us at all. Have you talked to the police about it?”
I nodded.
Ray winced, said, “Not good. Not good at all.”
“They know you killed Potrero.”
“Portray-who? Who’s that?”
His confusion seemed sincere.
“Doubleday’s gardener.”
“We didn’t kill him.” He got a little twinkle into his eyes when he smiled. “He committed suicide.”
“He tried to extort you?”
“Goodness, no. We hardly knew the man.” Ray looked back at his brother, said, “You know, when you stop to think about it, this has turned into a complete fiasco.”
“He’s your friend.” Jack positioned an examination light over my head, the bulb unlit. “We can trust him, you said. Sonny fucking Crockett, my ass!”
“The dog,” I said. “You’ll let him go?”
Again, the hand stroked my brow. “Dog? We’ll take good care of him, don’t you worry about that.”
“He was your dog?”
“Again, thanks for finding him. It worked out really well for us.”
“His teeth. He didn’t have any gum disease, did he?”
Ray propped his hand against the headrest beside my mouth and turned to his brother.
“Why did you pull them?” I asked.
Jack Belgard loomed over me, a surgical mask covering the lower half of his face, his eyes shielded by plastic goggles. In his right hand he . held a pair of stainless-steel forceps. Behind the plastic his eyes glistened, moist with excitement. His latex-gloved thumb clicked a switch and the examination light stabbed my eyes. He didn’t have to answer my questions. I knew the answers already, just as I had known since regaining my wits that they were going to pull my teeth and bury me in one of the many deserts surrounding Los Angeles; after a few weeks in the ground, robbed of my documents and teeth, not even God would be able to identify me. I glanced at Ray Belgard’s hand.
“You want my teeth?” I said. “Go ahead, take them.”
I snapped my head to the side and bit him just above the wrist. As I bit down I screamed from animal rage and a little human guile. Mine wouldn’t be the only blood evidence left at the scene. He tried to pull his arm away but I’d bitten so deeply into the flesh that my teeth locked onto bone. His screams, openmouthed, were louder than mine. He clubbed at my face with his fist. The black-haired one lunged across my chest, his latex gloves clawing at my mouth. We were all yelling in the violence of the moment. Blood gushed from my mouth when they ripped the arm away. Ray howled, turned his back to the room, and clutched the wound to his chest. I screamed and thrashed. His brother backed toward the door, panicking, and jerked the pistol from his drawstring. A low roar sounded from the hallway and a muscular black shape hurtled into the room. Jack turned to the Rott leaping for his throat. The gun went off, a hard sound like cracking metal, brutal to the ears. Ray jerked forward near the far wall, and I thought for a moment he might have been hit, but he moved too frantically for a gunshot man, and I realized he was trying to get away from the pistol. His back had been turned. He couldn’t see it. He didn’t know where it pointed.
The Rott’s paws skittered on the slick linoleum floor as he tried to get his legs beneath him for another lunge. Jack backed against the doorway, shouting to get out of the way, the dog scrambling to its feet at his brother’s heels. The strap binding my right wrist loosened and I wrenched one hand free. The Rott sprang forward. A second shot splintered the air. Ray stumbled in his panic and brought the instrument tray down with him in a spray of probes and picks. The Rott hit the gunman chest high and knocked him back into the hallway. I twisted to the side, ripped the strap from my left hand, and sat up to free my legs. The Rott rolled once and tried to get up for another attack, but something in his front legs failed him, and he yelped. Jack Belgard’s hand trembled when he raised the gun again, nerves strung taut between adrenaline and fear. I opened my mouth to scream but another voice sounded first, from the hall, ordering him to freeze. Belgard couldn’t freeze. He was shaking too hard.
The voice was a woman’s, and it brooked no nonsense.
The gun slipped from his hand like ice.
“Nina! You okay in there?”
It was my parole officer’s voice.
I scrambled out of the chair and kicked Ray Belgard in the face before he could even think about going for the gun. “I think my dog’s been shot,” I said.
Graves ordered Jack to the floor, and the first I saw of her was her automatic, pointed at his head, as she pulled first one hand, then the other behind his back to cuff him. I tore the restraints from the dental chair. Ray was lying on his belly, hands clutching his face. I jerked his wrists behind his back and tied them tight enough to pop the fingers from his fist.
One of the bullets had sheared through the window looking onto the courtyard, and through the hole pulsed the wail of distant sirens. Graves looked at me and winced. “Your mouth,” she said.
I wiped my face and my arm came away red with Belgard’s blood. She thought they’d been pulling my teeth. I edged around the dental chair. The Rott lay against the far wall, trying to lick the ragged star of flesh the bullet had left between his chest and shoulder. He looked at me, his brown eyes brave with pain, as though apologizing for his condition.
Graves said, “Hang tight, assistance is on the way.”
I squatted between the Rott’s front and back legs and slid my forearms beneath his body. The Rott weighed eighty pounds. I braced my back against the wall and pushed up from my heels, clutching the Rott against my chest. My legs trembled and held. I could have lifted a small car just then. The Rott yelped but he didn’t struggle. He was a good dog. He knew he needed help, and he trusted me to do the right thing for him, even if it hurt doing it.
“What are you doing?” Graves said.
“Taking my dog to the vet.”
“You can’t just walk out of here.”
“You’ll have to shoot me to prove I can’t.”
“Put him down. We’ll get somebody to come.”
“You can’t get an ambulance to come for a dog.”
I staggered around Jack Belgard and down the hall.
“You can’t leave a crime scene like this!”
I walked down the hall.
“Do you want to go to prison again?”
The front door hadn’t latched. I pried a crack with my foot, turned, and used my hip to nudge it open.
“Wait! Who are these guys?” I told her to call Detective Alvarez.
“Last warning. If you walk out now, I won’t COP you.”
“I already made my choice,” I said and backed out the door.
The animal hospital lay less than a mile distant, through streets showing stretches of open asphalt—space to run the Caddy fast and hard. I gunned out of the lot, the Rott’s shoulders in my lap, head in the crook of my arm, his eyes rolling back as the blood seeped into my jeans. The alarm company’s patrol car swung wide across my windshield, nearly clipping my front fender as it lunged across the sidewalk and into the lot. In my rearview mirror I caught the flash of lights as he braked to catch the color, make, and model of my car. I kissed the brake and yanked the wheel right onto Santa Monica Boulevard, sliding through the stop sign without appreciable loss of speed. Three SMPD cruisers sped in tight, bumper-to-bumper formation through the opposing lanes, the red strobe of emergency lights cleaving traffic to the curb on both sides. They clipped past and spun left onto the street I’d just left, heading for the medical center. I took full advantage of the good citizens who pulled to the side of the road, palmed my horn to keep the lane clear, cut left across accelerating traffic, then right onto Wilshire Boulevard and right again into the parking lot of Wilshire Animal Hospital, slinging the Caddy to a stop beneath a sign marked “Emergency Entrance.” I was out the door while the smoke was still rising from the tires. With the Rott braced against my chest I elbowed the emergency-service buzzer, didn’t release the pressure until the door opened to an angry countenance that pulled sharply back to alarm at the sight of the dog and my trembling arms. She led me down a hallway smelling of fur and antiseptic and into the operating room, centered by a waist-high stainless-steel table.
“Put him down,” she said and was gone.
I tottered forward and eased the Rott onto the table. His limbs had begun to loosen in my arms, and I understood this meant he’d gone into shock. I took his head in my hands, trying to comfort him, but the animal I knew wasn’t there any more, not yet dead, but wandering the void that divides the living from the dead.
“A gunshot wound, you said?”
The veterinarian moved quickly to the site of the wound and called for an intravenous line to the assistant who had met me at the entrance.
“Thirty-eight-caliber handgun.” My legs trembled from the strain of carrying the Rott. My voice shook from nerves. I didn’t think it made much difference what caliber of bullet hit him. I just wanted to help.
“You did well to get him here so quickly,” the vet said. “Now I’m going to ask you to wait in the lobby, let us do our work.”
She glanced up from her inspection of the wound when I didn’t move right away. Her blond hair was going gray, and she wore it tied behind her neck. The lines in her face spoke eloquently of long days stretching into nights, nights stretching into mornings, and she moved with the practiced precision of someone who knew what needed to be done when.
“Just save him,” I said. “Please.” And backed out the door.
I paced the lobby while they operated, seven strides forward and seven back, willing myself to trust in whatever God might be. I knew my life’s course had veered in the past hour, and I wanted to be smart enough to calculate where that change in direction might take me before the only choice left was the sharp edge of a cliff and a hard fall. I needed money, and a lot of it. The Rott’s medical bill would be considerable if he lived, and I wasn’t willing to consider any other possibility. Terry Graves had threatened to ticket me back to prison for leaving the scene of a crime. The police wouldn’t place my arrest very high on their list of priorities, but that wouldn’t make me any less arrested once they got around to knocking on my lumber. I still hadn’t paid my lawyer for his previous services in my defense, and if I was going to have any chance of slipping by without prison time, his fees would be considerable. That was the way the system worked: if you could buy a good lawyer you were assumed to be a productive member of society and given every possible break; if you had state-appointed counsel, you were a bum, and you did time. I didn’t want to do time again.
The quickest route to money was to find Angela Doubleday or what remained of her. Even a photograph of the room in which she’d been murdered or a shot of her makeshift grave would bring something from the tabloids. Maybe I could get close enough to photograph her before calling the police, if she was held captive and alive. I had no idea where the Belgards might have taken her, but I thought I knew how they’d met. “He’s your friend,” Jack Belgard had said. Then something about Sonny Crockett, followed by an expletive. My brain had been as poisoned as everyone else’s by t
he television shows of the 1980s. Sonny Crockett was a character in Miami Vice, played by Don Johnson, the man I wanted to marry when I was fifteen years old. The man was the personification of ’80s style, all sunglasses, swept-back hair, and blue jeans, a sports car of a man as hot as his Ferrari. The Belgards didn’t have the class to know Don Johnson, but I knew someone with Miami Vice on his resume and who would claim not only to know him but to be a close personal friend. I called Frank at Scandal Times. He answered with a stressed shout, wondering where I was.
I didn’t answer him, not then.
“Troy Davies,” I said.
“What about him?”
“You’re going to do a major story on him.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I think he kidnapped Angela Doubleday.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I found the Belgards or, rather, they found me.”
Frank was a quick thinker, but that took him a few seconds to process. “You’re still talking, so you must be okay.”
“They shot my dog, Frank. I’m not okay.”
“Where are you?”
“At a vet on Wilshire.”
“Where are the Belgards?”
Frank knew how to get to the point quickly.
“Cuffed to the floor of a dental office, surrounded by cops.” I gave him the address, heard the clatter of his chair falling back and the wheezing of his lungs as he hurried out the door. “I need you to do a background check tonight on Davies, no matter what.”
“I’ll get to it,” he promised. “One last thing?”
“What?”
“Did you get any photographs?”
I almost smiled at his audacity. Then I hung up on him. I hoped a background check would tell me whether Davies had ever lived in Florida. The older Belgard looked about the same age as Troy. Maybe they had worked or gone to school together. I switched the mobile phone from vibrate to chirp. I didn’t know where the next eight hours would take me, and I didn’t want to miss Frank’s call.
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