When I got within five feet, the back door popped open. Just a few inches. The handle felt cool under my fingers. I got in. Two men up front, mid-forties, high and tight hair. The smell of the leather interior.
The guy in the passenger seat turned around, placed a thick hand next to the headrest. My heart was pounding so hard I could barely hear my voice. "I'm here," I said. "I came. Please leave my mom alone."
The driver was more slender. He laughed. "I'm afraid you misunderstood. We weren't threatening your mother. We don't want to involve her in this. I'm sure you don't either." His voice-the one I'd just heard on the phone.
He pulled out from the curb. I was too terrified to ask where we were going. They listened to the radio. Small talk about college hoops. Slim had a girl on the side who was turning into a hassle.
We headed toward downtown. I was certain I was going to be shot and dumped under a freeway. I finally worked up the nerve to speak. "I don't know anything. I didn't see anything. I swear to God."
The big guy said, "Radio sucks out here, huh?" and twisted the dial.
We pulled up in front of an imposing, almost futuristic gray building with endless floors, bulges, and tiny windows. Slim said, "Out."
But there were no interior door handles. Slim came around, tugged me onto the sidewalk. A big sign read METROPOLITAN DETENTION CENTER. I knew from Frank that it was a federal facility. My legs sagged under me, and the big guy grabbed my arm and helped me inside. At the guard console, Slim removed some folded papers from his jacket pocket and handed them across. "We have signed clearance."
The guard nodded. The way he nodded-deferentially-put a fresh charge into my anxiety.
He waved us through, and then we were in an elevator, then moving down a dark corridor past men shuffling in leg cuffs. They booked me, printed me, and put me in an interrogation room. I sat in the chair, trying not to cry. They circled me.
Slim's footsteps tapped the concrete. Paused. "We know."
I swallowed dryly. "You know what?"
"What happened to Frank Durant." He came back into view, using a thumbnail to pick at his teeth. "You killed him."
I couldn't get out any words.
"Unless…" The big guy turned the other chair around and sat on it backwards. "Unless you stop trying to upset your mother. You see, Frank was killed by a burglar. That's the story. And if he wasn't, then he was killed by you." He slung a pistol, encased in a crime-scene evidence bag, over the chair back. Frank's Glock, still covered in blood. I hadn't seen him carrying the gun; it had appeared magically. "Your prints."
Slim was leaning against the far wall. "Can you imagine? After all Frank did for you. Took you in. Treated you like his own."
Tears ran down my face. Hot. My voice came out hoarse. "I would never have."
"Then I guess that burglar whacked him."
Slim jerked his head. They both got up and walked out. Leaving me there.
I waited what seemed like a long time.
They came back in and led me out. Down a concrete corridor with sweating walls. We came up on a giant rolling door built of bars. Beyond, a general holding tank. Sinewy men with pale skin and tattoos doing pull-ups. Mexicans bickering over smokes. Bandannas tied over perspiring ebony skulls. I had never felt smaller. I had never felt younger.
The big guy put his hand on one of the door's bars. "Want a night to think it over?"
I shook my head, wiped my nose.
They steered me through the concrete maze and down to the street. In the back of the sedan, I cried a bit but tried not to make noise. We weren't driving back to Glendale. We were driving to LAX. Slim pulled over at Terminal One. The big guy handed me a torn piece of paper, then dialed the car phone and stretched it back to me.
"Read," he said.
My throat was closing up, but I fought it open. Callie's answering-machine greeting finished, and after the beep I read from the slip of paper, "I know
I'm responsible for Frank's death. I can't figure out how to face you every day. I'm sorry. I hope you'll forgive me."
The worst part was, they'd gotten it right.
The big guy flipped an envelope into my lap. Filled with thousands of dollars in traveler's checks. I felt my last ray of hope extinguish. I thought about the financial-aid package waiting for me at UCLA. I thought about the baseball team. The attention I might get. The opportunities.
He said, "You don't talk about this to anyone. Ever. Or we'll know. And we'll know who you talked to also. We won't be nearly as accommodating next go-round. To you or her. Bear that in mind."
I said, "I will."
"You stay gone. A good long time. Understand?"
I nodded.
"If they require guardian clearance for you to buy a ticket"-he pointed at a phone number that had been written on the envelope flap-"you're two days shy of your eighteenth birthday. Forty-eight hours."
I had forgotten.
He knuckled his broad nose, and it made a faint popping sound. "By the time they declare you a missing person, you'll be an adult. Able to uphold your commitments."
So that's what I was now. A missing person.
My stomach roiling, I got out, clutching the envelope. Cars honked, cops ticketed, people hugged one another good-bye. In a stunned haze, I stepped into the terminal, and the glass doors whistled shut behind me.
Chapter 11
After my meeting with Caruthers, I went home to change out of the hospital-gift shop T-shirt. Then I headed over to the First Union Bank of Los Angeles, on Montana Avenue between a handmade-soap store and a juice place with little doormats of wheatgrass in the window.
I waited until I was in line to pull the brass key from my sneaker, and I hid it in my fist until I reached the teller's window. The security cameras were making me sweat. The emergency exit was just past the loan desk-if I hopped the rope, I could be in the alley in a few seconds. My paranoia had returned, so forcefully it seemed impossible there'd ever been the quiet life I'd been torn out of last night.
"My stepdad just died, and my mom found this key among his possessions. How can we figure out which bank it belongs to?"
The bank teller looked at me over her glasses, then took Charlie's key and examined it in the flat of her palm.
"Doesn't look like a safe-deposit key to me." She took my disappointment for greed. "Oh, honey, even if it was, I doubt the box would be filled with something your mom would want. You'd be amazed the things people keep locked up. Most of them sentimental."
"Why don't you think it's a bank key?"
She tilted it. "Well, at least ours don't have as many grooves. They're flatter, with square teeth and a cloverleaf head. Plus, this one says it belongs to the U.S. government, but we're privately owned. Banks generally are." She handed it back. "I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help, and I'm sorry to hear about your father. I just lost my mom, so I know how hard it can be sorting through the possessions, trying to figure out how to do right by a loved one."
Her gentle smile made me feel like a heel. I thanked her and left.
The locksmith a few blocks down didn't even give me the chance to lie to him. He was a burly man with a bottlebrush mustache and an indistinct accent. "I not can copy for you. Our blanks not are thick enough, bro." He rolled the r in "bro," infusing it with an / sound.
"I don't actually need it copied."
"Unlawful-to-duplicate key require seven-pin key blank. Illegal to have seven-pin key blank, bro." A massive eyebrow contorted suspiciously, pinching his right eye. His name tag, which read ASK ME, MY NAME is: RAz! didn't match his apparent gravity. "You are cop?"
"No, I'm not a cop."
"You not can lie about, you know."
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"Because I'm a cop."
Raz eyed me, then smirked. "Listen, bro. Perhaps I get seven-pin key blank from Canada? Perhaps I copy, but it will cost extra, eh? The risk for illegal."
"I actually don't need it copied. I was hoping y
ou could just tell me what kind of key it is."
He sighed, indignant, then knocked the key against the countertop. "It is good key, pure brass, not cheap alloy."
"I just found it. It was my stepfather's. What do you think it goes to?"
He screwed up his mouth, his mustache arching like a displeased caterpillar. "I have to guess, I say post-office box."
"Thank you."
"You want to copy, you come back here."
I shook his warm, oversize hand and came away with his business card. I said, "I promise, bro."
Crime-scene tape had been strung across the smashed-through garage door of the run-down little house in Culver City, and bullet holes pockmarked the soft wood of the facade. I'd parked a few blocks away and come over on foot, feeling safely anonymous in the thickening dusk.
I kept to the far side of the street and walked past the house, keeping my head down and my pace swift. In the footage I'd watched on the hospital room's TV, the reporter had positioned herself by the front walk where the yellow tape had come unmoored and was fluttering provocatively.
I went around the block and came back, pausing behind an empty van. The parked vehicles appeared to be empty, and I spotted no one lingering or watching the house. I wasn't surprised that the media had decamped after shooting their soft leads last night. But no ongoing surveillance from the cops? That pretty much confirmed that the terrorist story sold to the press was the flimsy cover I'd suspected it to be.
I remembered a lesson I'd learned in another life on the bleached-white tundra. Liffman's Rules: When you don't know what to do, wait longer.
It was a fairly busy street, so I walked to the corner gas station, drank a cup of dense coffee, and returned to see if anything had changed. As I turned the corner, a police car appeared, slowed a bit in front of the house, and continued on its way. They were making a cursory show of keeping an eye on the place, at least, but it still hardly felt like a terrorist watch. I wondered who made those decisions and at what level.
I stuck my hand in my pocket, clenched it around Charlie's key. I'd checked it at the five closest post offices, starting with the one for the house's zip code. The key was appropriately sized for the P.O. box locks, giving me a stab of excitement each time it slid home, but it had refused to turn. Even if my locksmith bro had guessed right, there were countless other P.O. Box 229s in Los Angeles, let alone the country.
To figure out whatever Charlie wanted me to know, I wasn't sure what else I could do. Besides break into a crime scene.
Back in my hiding spot behind the van, I realized that I was balking because I was scared. This just wasn't the kind of thing a reasonable person did. But nothing about this situation felt reasonable.
I walked briskly up the sidewalk toward the house, timing my arrival with a break in traffic. I slipped through the crime-scene tape blocking the gaping hole the Jeep had made when it had blasted through the garage door, and I crouched in the silence, listening for shouts or approaching footsteps. I heard nothing but the drip of a faucet in the rust-stained sink, rats moving in the walls, the sound of my quickened breathing. By ducking under that tape, I'd crossed a line. In the dark quiet, the danger seemed suddenly more tangible.
After ten minutes, or twenty, I rose and poked around the garage, careful to keep back in the shadows. Several jars on a warped shelf held dried industrial glue. A jackhammer tilted in the corner, its red handle gleaming. A few oil-slick wrenches beneath a dusty workbench, a stack of National
Geographies near the step, a faded plastic sandbox on end. I knew it was a rental even before I pushed through the creaking door into the empty interior.
I stood in silence, listening to the sounds of the house. A groaning pipe, a tired floorboard, a loose shutter. There was literally no furniture. A plastic McDonald's cup in the sink. Grease-spotted wrappers in the tipped-over trash bucket. Empty drawers on top of the stove, refrigerator shoved out from the wall-the search had been thorough.
I stepped into the living room. Beams of yellow from the streetlights shot through countless bullet holes, skewering my body as I passed through.
In the tiny bathroom, the medicine cabinet had been torn from the wall and thrown into the tub, bits of mirror twinkling in the faint light like gems. The folding closet doors in the bedroom had been ripped back on their hinges, one of them snapped, and a few items of clothing dumped on the floor. An army-green sleeping bag lay bunched in the corner, as if to make as little an intrusion on the square of dusty carpet as possible. As if Charlie had wanted to curl up there and disappear.
I paused in the doorway, the loneliness of the life lived here settling into my bones. Even if the Service had cleared the place out, it was obvious that Charlie had lived like a squatter. Like someone biding time. Until what?
I walked over and straightened out Charlie's sleeping bag, then lay where he'd slept. A neighbor's porch light glowed through the vertical blinds. The low vantage and the room's bareness added to a feeling of purposeful desolation. As if he were punishing himself for something. As if he didn't believe he deserved more than this.
The tiny den across the hall was empty, the closet bare, save for an attic hatch. I pulled myself up and peered around the crawl space. I could see where numerous boots-law enforcement? — had stamped through the blanket of dust.
Dust.
I dropped down and hurried back into the garage, flattening against the wall to the side of the blown-out garage door. With a finger I drew a line in the dust on the lids of the glue jars. And again on the top cover of that stack of National Geographies. I forced myself to wait to see if there would be another police drive-by. It seemed an eternity, but finally the car materialized, slowed, drifted off.
Then I scurried past the gaping hole to the jack-hammer in the corner.
I touched that gleaming handle.
No dust.
I searched the slab for any signs of chiseling or new concrete. None. Back inside, moving quickly. A cockroach skittered across the worn-out linoleum, but there was no sign that the flooring had been peeled back.
I closed my eyes, running through possibilities. I thought about how Frank had installed that alarm monitor beside his bed so he could sleep knowing it was right there.
Racing back into the bedroom, I tugged the sleeping bag from the corner and ran my hands over the carpet, feeling for bumps in the concrete beneath. Perfectly smooth-it would have had to be or it would've been discovered in the search. In the stripes of light from the blinds, I noted how the carpet edges lifted ever so slightly from the walls in the corner. From this angle I could see that it had been pulled up for about three feet in either direction before being smoothed in place again.
It took a few pinches to get a grip on the carpet, then I peeled it back. It came easily, revealing a floor safe embedded in the concrete slab.
I was breathless. The house had been searched, but no one had bothered to lie where Charlie had lain in his sad little corner, had bothered to inhabit his world of asceticism and paranoia.
The lock in the floor safe took a tubular key. I'd hauled Charlie's key around all day, and it didn't match the safe he'd slept on top of every night. It made me wonder how many more secrets a guy like Charlie had.
I sat back on my heels like a little kid. A muscle car blew by outside, the engine spatter loud through the thin walls. A draft rippled the vertical blinds, making the strips of light roll across my face, the walls, making the room come alive. I felt a surprising calm, the still excitement I used to get when I read a ball coming out of the pitcher's hand and knew I would hit it before it was halfway to the plate.
I rose and headed into the kitchen. I pulled the McDonald's cup from the sink, reached down through the rotting rubber guard into the garbage disposal. My fingers brushed a magnetic box. I pulled it out, slid back the grimy lid, and held the tubular key to the faint light.
My head buzzing with childish excitement, I retraced my steps, sank to my knees on the tugged-back carpet, and
lowered the key into place. It fit snugly, the gears shifting in the floor safe. I blew a breath through clenched teeth. The weighty door lifted silently. Hooked to the inside handle, a rope trailed down into shadow. When I tugged, whatever it was connected to gave surprising resistance. I pulled up the rope hand over hand, not sure I wanted to see what would rise into view.
A rucksack, just like the one Charlie had brought with him into San Onofre. It was full, stuffed so the fabric was taut. I undid the buckles and flipped it over before I could lose my nerve.
Out tumbled stack after stack of hundred-dollar bills, bundled neatly in purple bands.
Chapter 12
With $180,000 slung over one shoulder, I walked as casually as I could back toward my condo. The nearest parking space I'd found was five blocks away, not bad considering that it was past nine o'clock and folks had slotted their cars for the night. I paused to glance in store windows and pretended to tie my shoelaces to check if anyone was following me. All these years later and here I was again, edgy as a fugitive.
As I approached the corner mart, a woman with pursed lips confronted a massive man, his rotund form draped with layers of ripped, dirt-blackened clothing. Even the real-estate prices hadn't driven the smart homeless people out of temperate Santa Monica.
The woman pulled a dollar bill from her purse and handed it to him. "Do not spend this on alcohol."
"Absolutely not, ma'am."
His benefactor's Lexus chirped twice, and she climbed in and drove off. He heard my footfall and turned at my approach, scratching his bloated belly. Despite a leonine mess of curly hair and a nose swollen to absurdity from weather and alcohol, he had astute, intelligent features.
His face lit up. "Nick, I'm two bucks shy of a pint."
I dug in my pocket, came up with a few crumpled bills. "Do not spend this on alcohol."
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