Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  “I don’t care about the murders anymore,” she said firmly. “I don’t want to know. I don’t need to know.”

  “The woman in the house is Bill Danko’s daughter,” Jimmy said. “Her name is Rosemary.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “She was nine or ten when he was killed. Her mother died a year or so ago. Maybe that pushed her over the edge, sent her looking for the house in Naples.”

  “I want this to end,” Jean said. “This is my choice. I don’t need to know any more.”

  “I don’t think your father did it. Your mother was probably just in the wrong place with the wrong guy. There’s a woman who may have done it, one of her friends. Actually, there were two women who may have done it. Bill Danko had a wife.”

  “Stop.”

  “There’s some link to now, to today.”

  “Stop it.”

  “To the people who run things. But I don’t know why.”

  “Stop!” Her fists were clenched.

  But he wasn’t finished. He wanted to tell her. He wanted her to know all of it.

  But he stopped himself.

  She wanted to get out, to cool off, to ride somewhere, so they were on the streets of Hollywood in the yellow Challenger. It was after nine and still hot. They rode out Sunset, east, into East L.A. Jimmy pulled up into the corner lot where there was a Tommy’s burger stand, the original Tommy’s. A paletero, a Mexican ice cream man with his triciclo, a cart on rubber wheels, was supplying dessert for the crowd sharing the white-painted picnic tables. Jimmy bought Jean a cup of shaved ice doused in bloodred watermelon syrup so sweet it made your teeth hurt.

  They doubled back on Sunset Boulevard in East L.A. The traffic was heavy but easy going. A real-life lowrider came past them in the other lane, bass notes thumping, echoing off the faces of the storefronts and second-story apartments that made the street a canyon. Maybe everyone was just trying to cool off, nowhere to go, to forget about what they would have to remember tomorrow.

  Jean looked out the side window, a girl on her front steps, reading a book by streetlight. They were on Franklin now, one edge of Hollywood, in a neighborhood of single houses with no yards, sidewalks right up to the windows, rental houses, Russian families in this block, and a few busted actors.

  “Who was it?” Jean said, still looking out the window. “Which friend of Mother’s?”

  Jimmy thought, No one can look away. Everyone has to know.

  “Michelle. Michelle Simmonds. She became Michelle Espinosa.”

  “One of The Jolly Girls.”

  “Yes.”

  He told her about the five-foot-one angle.

  “Have you talked to her?”

  “She’s dead a long time.”

  Jean nodded, still not looking at him. She thought that was all there was. She felt strong for asking.

  “I think someone killed her,” Jimmy said. “But it wasn’t down as a murder. She drowned. In the Marina.”

  Jean turned and he saw the sudden hurt on her face, the world-pain. Jimmy kept forgetting that most people didn’t see the world the way he did, the way he had for most of his years, full of treachery and death and dark motives. Most people thought almost everyone was good.

  “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said. “I have to watch myself.”

  “What do you mean?” She didn’t feel so strong anymore.

  “Always thinking the worst,” he said. “People die all the time. Natural causes.”

  They had passed into Los Feliz, a richer neighborhood of thirties and forties apartment buildings on streets sloping up toward the low hills, the backside of the Hollywood Hills below Griffith Park.

  After a ways, Jean said, “You said this was somehow connected to other people. Who?”

  Like an answer, there were headlights in the mirror.

  They were back. They’d been behind them all the way from before Tommy’s, through four or five rights and lefts, a white Taurus, two heads haloed by the lights behind them.

  Lon and Vince had traded in the Escort for a Taurus.

  Now they were closing. Fast.

  Jean looked over at him, saw him with his eyes on the mirror.

  “Put on your seatbelt,” Jimmy said.

  She turned around to look. “What?”

  On the next side street, a second car, the black BMW 745 iL, waited at a stop sign—with a man in a peacoat and watch cap standing beside it.

  “What’s the matter?” Jean said. “Who are they?”

  Jimmy gunned it and the Challenger streaked away, blowing past the BMW on the side street, leaving the Taurus to try to catch up.

  She put her seatbelt on.

  The man in the peacoat next to the BMW stepped back and the driver pulled it into gear and spun into a U-turn and roared up the hill.

  Jimmy was already two blocks away. He’d taken a hard left off of Franklin, onto Vermont, rolling up the rising straight street with the Taurus closing on him.

  “Who is it?” Jean said.

  “They’ve been following us.”

  “What do they want?”

  He was very cool. “We’ll lose them up here,” he said, as if it was an answer.

  The speedometer popped up to seventy. Jimmy went through a red light at a cross street called Ambrose and the Taurus stayed with him.

  But didn’t make it.

  A Jeep coming fast through the intersection tagged the left rear panel of Lon and Vince’s Taurus and sent it spinning, a pair of quick 360s in the middle of the X.

  Jimmy watched it in the mirror, the hit and the spinout. He was already at the next corner. This time the light was green.

  But then the black BMW came at him from the intersecting street, Los Feliz Boulevard, trying to T-bone him, or at least be there when somebody else did.

  Jimmy stood on it and cranked the wheel, sliding sideways to avoid him, then sped up the hill as the BMW skidded to a stop inches away from the nose of a fat beige Lexus.

  The two Sailors in the Taurus recovered and went after Jimmy, front wheels smoking.

  The BMW had stalled out. The driver lit it up again, backed it into a hard J and went after them, fishtailing for a second before the big powerful car got into the groove.

  The three cars—Challenger, Taurus, BMW—blew into Griffith Park on a straightaway on a boulevard through a canopy of trees, blew one, two, three past a sign nobody had time to read:

  OBSERVATORY GOLFCOURSE ZOO MERRY-GO -ROUND

  The Taurus was falling back, outgunned. Jimmy was at eighty, leading the thing. Jean sat with her hands on the dash in front of her, like it was a roller coaster.

  The first climbing left into the higher parklands was coming up fast. Just as they went into the hard curve, the BMW came up on their right, door to door. Jimmy dropped down a gear and the Challenger and the BMW took it together, mirror to mirror.

  Jimmy looked over to see the driver. The BMW eased off and fell back in behind him, then rolled over onto Jimmy’s left, moving up. They went like that through a pair of esses, a chicane. Jimmy would surge ahead for a moment, but the BMW would gain in the corners.

  “I might have brought the wrong car,” he said.

  Jean was wide-eyed.

  “Stop, please,” she said.

  The two cars banged fenders as the BMW driver tried to shove them into the outside rail. Jimmy got his first good look at him, but didn’t have time to process it.

  The Taurus was back.

  The three cars came around a corner, three wide, and there was the Griffith Observatory, lit up, green-domed, as sudden as an explosion. The turn was a hairpin and the screeching tires made people look, tourists and teenagers crossing over from the parking lot.

  The BMW sideswiped a van and spun into the parking lot and the Taurus rear-ended it. They were stopped.

  Jimmy pulled away.

  It was all downhill now, a straightaway down the backside of the low mountains. He wasn’t slowing.

  Jean looked back.

 
“Stop,” she said. “They’re gone.”

  But as soon as she’d said it, she saw the two pairs of headlights coming after them. She looked at him, at the look in his eyes. He was all the way into it, given over to it. It was frightening.

  They roared past two men standing close by a tree. Ahead was a cluster of cars, lights out, pairs of men leaning against the fenders, others sitting atop picnic tables, eyes bright dots in the Challenger’s headlights.

  Jimmy braked hard and stopped. Stopped dead.

  “What are you doing?” Jean said.

  “Get out. I’ll come back for you.”

  She didn’t want to get out.

  “Get out.”

  Jean opened her door.

  “It’s all right,” Jimmy said, but he was still that same man, changed and frightening and too full of purpose.

  She got out and he sped away, the power slamming the passenger door closed.

  Jimmy looked up in the mirror at the paired men and Jean, a couple of them stepping toward her.

  Ahead he had a clean straight run through a corridor of tall, dusted eucalyptus, a bridle path on one side. The speedometer, dim and green, touched a hundred. The Challenger was made for this.

  He smiled.

  In the moment he thought he was made for this, too. He shifted up a gear. The engine sucked in boost. Ahead, the mouth of a gentle curve. Jimmy barely slowed as he steered into it.

  Horses. Horses.

  Suddenly there were horses alongside the road, six horses, empty saddles, tied together and led by a mounted cowboy. All in the same second, the cowboy turned two silver reflecting eyes toward the car howling down the straightaway at him and the last animal in the line reared and leapt sideways into the road, and then the next in front of it followed.

  Jimmy yanked the wheel. The Challenger skidded and smoked and screeched and then slammed against the stout trunk of a eucalyptus.

  He was thrown against the window, knocked out.

  The first minute passed.

  The Hemi engine raced, roaring, then died.

  The horses whinnied wildly, all of them rearing now, shredding the air with their front hooves in the wash of the Challenger’s headlights still burning through the stirred up dust.

  The BMW was first to arrive. The driver got out.

  The cowboy fought to gather and control the six horses and himself.

  “He was—”

  “Yeah,” the BMW driver said, cool and calm. “Go to the phone. Get some help.” She had an accent.

  The cowboy did as he was told and let go of the spooked horses and pulled himself into the saddle of his own horse and rode away down the path. The trail horses tried to scatter but were still lashed together and pulled in different directions so that none of them escaped.

  The wrecked, smoking Taurus arrived. Lon and Vince. They got out, pumped up, ready to hurt someone but Jimmy was bloodied and looked dead.

  Another minute passed.

  A black Lincoln Town Car pulled up. Lon and Vince straightened, almost came to attention.

  The backdoor opened.

  Jimmy had started to come around. He was bleeding from a cut on the side of his face. He tried to focus, the headlights, the images through the shattered glass, through his own blood which streaked the window: the cars, one white, two black, figures moving.

  He saw the red-haired man with the long fingers, Boney M, get out of the back of the Lincoln Town Car. And, with the door open, another man in the backseat, under the spot of the reading light, a big man, familiar.

  Then someone was walking toward him.

  It was the BMW driver, the man in the expensive suit, slicked-back hair.

  But it was a woman in a dark expensive suit.

  It was the German girl from the Evergreen Club, from the dark beer, from the kisses in his cabin. He even heard her voice, her accent, as she said something to Lon and Vince.

  But then things got darker and faded out.

  FIFTEEN

  The sun was just up, the air smoky with a warm fog.

  Jimmy was backed against a tree, sitting in the eucalyptus leaves and brown grass. It looked like deep woods. You couldn’t see the road from here, or anything else. It was like he was in Australia, or wherever it was that eucalyptus trees came from.

  There was blood, dry and almost black, all around him, so much of it that he wondered how it could all be his.

  He thought of Jean. He got to his feet.

  Everything ached. One eye was sealed shut some way he didn’t want to see. A finger was broken. A few teeth felt loose.

  “Let me ask you something,” Drew said. “Can I die? I mean, again?”

  “You can get hurt,” Jimmy said, “bad, but you won’t die.”

  “Even if like a bullet went through my head, I wouldn’t die.”

  “No.”

  “If I was shredding down a mountain and pulled a full-on Sonny Bono, I wouldn’t die.”

  “No. You could get messed up, bad, but you wouldn’t die.”

  They’d pulled him out of the car and dragged him away and worked him over, Lon and Vince and maybe even the German woman, hoping for maximum mayhem, hoping to mess him up good, to try to make their point another way.

  Or maybe they did it just because they enjoyed it.

  He came out of the trees and found the straightaway road and then the scarred trunk that told him where he’d crashed, the skidmarks on the pavement and the furrows in the leaf-covered ground of the bridle path.

  The yellow Dodge was long gone, but his shoe was there.

  And the scars from the hooves of the trail horses.

  He thought maybe he’d dreamed them.

  He found the tracks where the black Lincoln had stopped and then turned around to go back up the straightaway. Somewhere in the fog, he’d decided the big familiar man glimpsed in the backseat had to be Harry Turner.

  But maybe he’d dreamed him.

  Jimmy and Angel went first to Jean’s apartment.

  Angel waited behind the wheel of his truck, the one with the blue moon over the city and the woman’s eyes airbrushed on the tailgate.

  There was no answer. Jimmy came back and got in.

  “She wasn’t there?” Angel said.

  Jimmy shook his head. Angel pulled out.

  “She had a phone,” Jimmy said after a minute. “She probably had somebody come get her.”

  He called her office. She was in a meeting.

  Jimmy tossed the phone onto the seat between them. Angel looked at him.

  “She’s all right.”

  Angel stopped at the bottom of the hill. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Home. I’ll get a car.”

  They rode along in silence another four or five blocks, then Jimmy said, “Maybe you can run down the Dodge, take it to the shop, see if you can put it right. I guess the cops towed it.”

  Angel nodded. “How bad is it?”

  “Bad.”

  Angel turned right. “You might want to get cleaned up a little, too.”

  Jimmy dropped the visor on his side and got his first look at himself in the mirror. He flipped the visor back up. It was better not to know.

  “So what’s happening with this lady?” Angel said.

  “I hadn’t talked to her since that night we picked up the kid,” he said. “She was spooked then. I don’t know what she’s thinking now. Maybe she’s figured it out.”

  “I doubt that,” Angel said. “She’s still around.”

  Jimmy fell silent.

  “It was the same Sailors?” Angel said.

  “The goofy guys and the leader from the thing up on the roof of the Roosevelt. And there’s something else going on. There’s a man in the middle of it, too, not a Sailor but maybe a kindred spirit.”

  “Who?”

  “His name is Harry Turner. The lawyer behind the scenes in the murder trial. He put a tail on me. He might have been there last night.”

  Jimmy wished again he’d gotten
a better look at him, at the big man in the backseat of the Lincoln. If I could be sure. It was how Jimmy knew he had passed over into the land of the secret, the territory of the unknown that always came in the middle of the case, when he heard himself saying, again and again, If I could be sure.

  “She was there, the tail. In a 745 BMW. She’s German. She’s not a Sailor either. Neither of them are.”

  “She’s the one ran you into a tree?”

  “No, I did that all by myself.”

  “How do you know this guy hired her?”

  “I saw him in the morning and she was there the same night. Up in Idyllwild.”

  “Tailing you?”

  After a moment, Jimmy said, “Yeah, very close.”

  Jimmy thought about her lips, about the way she’d put her hands over his eyes when she kissed him. He didn’t have to wonder what he’d said to her, what he might have revealed. He hadn’t said much of anything. And neither had she. She was good. In that bad kind of way.

  Harry Turner had read him right. Jimmy remembered Rosemary Danko’s line, They knew his weakness.

  “Why does this guy still care about some old settled murder case?”

  “That I don’t know,” Jimmy said.

  They rode along another block.

  “God had his hand on you,” Angel said.

  Jimmy nodded, never looking at him. They were on Sunset now, going past Tower Records yellow and red and then The Whisky and then the Hustler store full of tourist shoppers. In daylight. Was there any more secular place on the face of the earth?

  Jimmy had a decision to make, to go toward it or away from it.

  “So what are you going to do now?” Angel said, just as Jimmy was wondering the same thing.

  SIXTEEN

  Some things look like what they are. Jimmy and Jean were heading north on California 1, the coast road, approaching the southern end of Big Sur. This was the edge of a continent and it looked it. The road was just now climbing into the high section, coming up off of the grasslands and cattle ranches past Hearst Castle and Cambria. The massive mountains, long and brown and only crowned with evergreens at the highest reaches where the fog was, broke off jagged into the ocean, ending big.