LA Requiem ec-8

by Robert Crais

  "This ghost comes floating between the palm trees. This big white ghost, going 'ooo-ooo-ooo, I want my feet.' Real creepy and eerie, see, just like that."

  "Don't tell me. Your partner in a sheet."

  "No, it was the supervisor. He was trying to scare the girl."

  "What did you do?"

  "I whip out my Smith and shout, 'Freeze, motherfucker, LAPD.'And then I crack off all six rounds point-blank as fast as I can."

  "Dolan. You killed the guy?"

  She smiled at me, and it was a lovely smile. "No, you moron. I knew those assholes were going to try some shit like that sooner or later, so I always carried blanks."

  I laughed.

  "The supervisor drops to the ground in a little ball, arms over his head, screaming for me not to shoot. I pop all six caps, and then I go over, and say, 'Hey, Sarge, is this what they mean by foot patrol?' "

  I laughed harder, but Dolan took a deep breath and shook her head, I stopped laughing.

  "Sam?"

  Her eyes turned red, but she shook back the tears. "I put everything I had into this job. I never got married and I didn't have kids, and now it's gone."

  "Can you appeal it? Is there anything you can do?"

  "I could request a trial board, but if I go to the board, those pricks could fire me. Bishop just wants me out of Robbery-Homicide. He says I'm not a team player anymore. He says he doesn't trust me."

  "I'm sorry, Samantha. I'm really, really sorry. What happens now?"

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  "Administrative transfer. I'm on leave until I'm reassigned. They'll put me in one of the divisions, I guess. South Bureau Homicide, maybe, down in South Central." She looked down at her glass, and seemed surprised that it was empty.

  "At least you're still on the job."

  A kindness came to her eyes, as if I was a slow child. "Don't you get it, Cole? Wherever I go, it's downhill. Robbery-Homicide is the top. It's like being in the majors, then having to go down to the farm team in South Buttcrack. Your career's finished. All you're doing is killing time until they make you leave the game. You got any idea what that means to me?"

  I didn't know what to say.

  "My whole goddamned career has been forcing men like Bishop to let me be a starting player, and now I don't have a goddamned thing." She looked over at me. "God, I want you."

  I said, "Sam."

  She raised a hand again and shook her head.

  "I know. It's the tequila."

  She looked into the empty glass and sighed. She put the glass on the table, and crossed her arms as if she didn't know what to do with herself. She blinked because her eyes were filling again.

  She said, "Elvis?"

  "What?"

  "Will you hold me?"

  I didn't move.

  "I don't mean like that. I just need to be held, and I don't have anyone else to do it."

  I put down my beer and went over and held her.

  Samantha Dolan buried her face in my chest, and after a while the wet of her tears soaked through my shirt. She pulled away and wiped her hands across her face. "This is so pathetic."

  "It's not pathetic, Samantha."

  She sniffled, and rubbed at her eyes again. "I'm here because I don't have anyone else. I gave everything I had to this goddamned job, and now all I have to show for myself is a guy who's in love with another woman. That's pretty fucking pathetic, if you ask me."

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  "No one asked you, Samantha."

  "I want you, goddamnit. I want to sleep with you."

  "Shh."

  Her breast moved against my arm. "I want you to love me."

  "Shh."

  "Don't shush me, goddamnit."

  She traced her fingers along my thigh, her eyes shining in the dim light. She gazed up at me, and she was so close that her breath felt like fireflies on my cheek. She was pretty and tough and funny, and I wanted her. I wanted to hold her, and I wanted her to hold me, and if I could fill her empty places maybe she could fill mine.

  But I said, "Dolan, I can't."

  The kitchen door opened then, an alien sound that had no part in this moment.

  Lucy was in the kitchen, one hand still on the door, staring at us, a terrible pain cut into her eyes.

  I stood.

  "Lucy."

  Lucy Chenier snatched her purse from the counter, stalked back across the kitchen, and slammed out the door.

  Outside, her car roared to life, the starter screaming on the gears.

  Outside, her tires shrieked as she ripped away.

  Dolan slumped back into the couch, and said, "Oh, hell."

  The ache in my heart grew so deep that I felt hollow, as if I were only a shell and the weight of the air might crush me.

  I went after her.

  Lucy's Lexus was parked in front of her apartment, the engine still ticking when I got out of my car. Her apartment was lit, but the glow from the pulled drapes wasn't inviting. Or maybe I was just scared.

  I stood in the street, gazing at her windows and listening to her car tick. I leaned against her fender, and put my hand on the hood, feeling its warmth. One flight of stairs up to the second floor, but they might as well have gone on forever.

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  I climbed, and knocked softly at her door.

  "Luce?"

  She opened the door, and looked at me without drama. She was crying, sad tears like little windows into a well of hurt.

  "Dolan came over because she was fired. She's in love with me, or thinks she is, and she wanted to be with me."

  "You don't have to say this."

  "I told her that I couldn't be with her. I told her that I love you. I was telling her that when you walked in."

  Lucy stepped out of the door and told me to come in. Boxes had been put away. Furniture had been moved.

  She said, "You scared me."

  I nodded.

  "I don't mean with Dolan. I mean from earlier. I'm angry with you, Elvis. I'm hurt with you."

  Joe.

  "You changed your life to come here, Luce. You're worried about Richard, and what's going to happen with Ben. You don't need to worry about me. You don't need to doubt what we have, or how I feel, and what you mean to me. You mean everything to me."

  "I don't know that now."

  I felt as if the world had dropped away and I was hanging in space with no control of myself, as if the slightest breeze could make me turn end over end and there was nothing I could do but let the breeze push me.

  "Because of Joe."

  "Because you were willing to put everything that's important to me at risk."

  "Did you want me to call the cops and turn him in?" More tension was in my voice than I wanted there to be.

  She closed her eyes and raised a palm.

  "I guess you're mad at me, too."

  "I don't like these choices, Luce. I don't like being caught between you and Joe. I don't like Dolan coming to my house because she doesn't have anywhere else to go. I don't like what's happening between us right now."

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  She took a breath and let it out. "Then I guess we're both disappointed."

  I nodded.

  "I didn't come two thousand miles for this."

  I shook my head.

  I said, "Do you love me?"

  "I love you, but I don't know how I feel about you right now. I'm not sure how I feel about anything."

  It sounded so final and so complete that I thought I must have missed something. I searched her face, trying to see if there was something in her eyes that I was missing in her voice, but if it was there I couldn't find it. I wanted an emotional catharsis; her measured consideration made my stomach knot.

  "What are you saying here, Luce?"

  "I'm saying I need to think about us."

  "We're having a problem right now. Is it such a big problem that you'd question everything we feel for each other?"

  "Of course not."
<
br />   "That's what thinking about us means. One thing happens, you don't stop being an us."

  I looked around at the boxes. The stuff of her life. This wasn't going the way I had hoped. I wasn't hearing things that I wanted to hear. And I wasn't doing a good job of saying the things I had wanted to say.

  Lucy took my hand in both of hers.

  "You said I changed my life to come here, but my coming here changes your life, too. The change didn't end when I crossed the city line. The change is still happening."

  I put my arms around her. We held each other, but the uncertainty was like a membrane between us.

  After a time, she eased away. She wasn't crying now; she seemed resolved.

  "I love you, but you can't stay here tonight."

  "Is it that clear to you?"

  "No. Nothing's clear. That's the problem."

  She took my hand again, gently kissed my fingers, and told me to leave.

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  Sacrifice

  The killer presses the needle deep into his quadriceps and injects twice the usual amount of Dianabol. The pain makes him furious, his rage causing his skin to flush a deep red as his blood pressure spikes. He throws himself onto the bench, grips the bar, and pushes.

  Three hundred pounds.

  He lowers the weight to his chest, lifts, lowers, lifts. Eight reps of herculean inhuman effort that does nothing to appease his anger.

  Three hundred motherfucking pounds.

  He rolls off the bench and glares at himself in the mirror here in his shitty little rental. Muscles swollen, chest flushed, face murderous. Calm yourself. Take control. Put away the rage and hide yourself from the world.

  His face empties.

  Become Pike to defeat Pike.

  The killer takes a calming breath, returns to the bench, sits.

  Pike's escape has changed things, and so have Cole and that bitch Dolan. Knowing that he's been framed, Pike will try to figure out who, and will be coming for him. Cole and Dolan have already tried to get DeVille's file, and that's bad, but he also knows they didn't get it. Without DeVille's file they cannot follow the trail back to him, but they're getting closer, and the killer accepts that they are very close to identifying him.

  He must act now. He decides to jump ahead to the final targets, and nothing must stop him. Pike is the wild card, but Cole he can account for. Cole must be distracted. Get his mind off saving Pike, and onto something else.

  He believes that Dolan has always been overrated as an investigator, so the killer discounts her. But Cole is another matter. He has met Cole, and studied him. Cole is dangerous. An ex-Army guy who wears the Ranger tab, and an experienced investigator. Cole does not appear dangerous in an obvious way, but many officers respect him. He heard one senior detective say not to let the wisecracks and loud shirts fool

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  you, that Cole can carry all the weight you put on him, and still kick your ass. The killer takes this opinion seriously.

  When you are plotting against the enemy, you always look for an exploitable weakness.

  Cole has a girlfriend.

  And the girlfriend has a child.

  32

  I walked down the infinite flight of steps from Lucy's apartment to sit in my car. I thought about starting it, but that was beyond me. I tried to be angry with her, but wasn't. I tried to resent her, but that made me feel small. I sat there in my open car on her quiet street until her lights went out, and even then I did not move. I just wanted to be close to her, even if she was up in her apartment and I was down in my car, and for most of the night I tried to figure out how things could go so wrong so quickly. Maybe a better detective could've found answers.

  The sky was pale violet when I finally pulled away. I was content to creep along in the morning traffic, the mindless monotony of driving the car familiar and comforting. By the time I reached home, Dolan was gone. She had left a note on the kitchen counter. What it said was, /'// talk to her if you want.

  I cleaned our glasses from the night before, put away the tequila, and was heading upstairs for a shower when the phone rang.

  My heart pounded as I stared at the phone, letting it ring a second time. I took a breath, and nodded to myself.

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  On the third ring I picked it up, trying not to sound like I'd just run ten miles.

  "Lucy?"

  Evelyn Wozniak said, "Why didn't you call?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I left a message yesterday. I said you should call no matter what time you got in."

  I had checked my message machine when Pike was still in the house, but there had been no messages. I looked at it now, again finding nothing.

  "Okay. You've got me now."

  Evelyn gave me directions to the storage facility that her mother used in North Palm Springs. She had had a duplicate key made for the lock, and had left it for me in an envelope with the on-site manager. I asked her if she wanted to be there when I went through her father's things, but she said that she was scared of what she might find. I could understand that. I was scared, too.

  When she was done, I said, "Evelyn, did you leave any of this on your message?"

  "Some of it. I told you the name of the place. I know it was your machine and not somebody else's, if that's what you're thinking. Who else would have a message that says they're the world's greatest human being?"

  I put down the phone, then went upstairs, changed clothes, and drove to Palm Springs, wondering if Pike had heard the message, and if he'd erased it.

  And why.

  When I was thinking about Pike, I didn't have to think about Lucy.

  Two hours and ten minutes later, I left the freeway and again made my way through the wind farms. The desert was already hot, and smelled of burning earth.

  The storage facility was clusters of white cinder-block sheds set in the middle of nowhere behind a chain-link fence with a big metal gate. A cinder-block building sat by the

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  gate with a big sign saying LOWEST RATES AROUND. Since nothing else was around, it was an easy guarantee to keep.

  An overweight woman with skin like dried parchment gave me the key. Her office was small, but a Westinghouse air conditioner big enough to cool a meat locker was built into the wall, running full blast and blowing straight at her. It was little enough.

  She said, "You gonna be in there long?"

  "I don't know. Why?"

  "Gonna be hot," she said. "Make sure you don't pass out. You pass out, don't you try to sue me."

  "I won't."

  "I'm warning you. I got some nice bottled water in here, only a dollar and a half."

  I bought a bottle to shut her up.

  Paulette Renfro's storage unit was located at the rear of the facility. Each unit was a cinder-block shell that sprouted corrugated-metal storage spaces. There was no door on the shell, so you walked inside what amounted to a little cave to get to the individual storage spaces.

  From the tarnish on the lock, it was clear that Paulette rarely if ever came here, but the key worked smoothly, and opened into a space the size of a closet. Boxes of various size were stacked along the walls, along with old electric fans and suitcases, and two lamps.

  I emptied the closet, putting the unboxed things to the side, then carried out the boxes. When all the boxes were out, I went through the older boxes first, and that's where I found the notebooks that Evelyn Wozniak remembered. Her father had kept field notes much like a daybook, jotting notes about the young officers he trained, the perps he busted, and the kids he was trying to help, all dated, and crammed into seven small three-ring binders thick with pages. I was pretty sure that the most recent would be the most relevant.

  I put the seven binders aside, then went through the rest of the boxes to see if anything else might be useful, but the only other things of Abel's were a patrol cap in a plastic bag, a presentation case with Wozniak's badge, and t
wo framed com-

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  mendations from when he was awarded the Medal of Valor. I wondered why the commendations were here in a box, but she had remarried. I guess over time she'd lost track of them.