“This is outrageous. You won’t do anything?”
“I’m afraid I can’t.”
“It was a mistake to call you. You’re as incompetent as the police—and as rude.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“This man could be coming after me. After me.”
“If he is, you’ll need to be more cooperative in order to enlist my assistance. I can’t work in the dark.”
“I’ll speak to your superiors. I’ll speak to whoever runs your office here in Los Angeles.”
“That should be a pleasant chat.” Tess smiled. “You and he may see eye to eye on a lot of things.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Good night, Ms. Grant.”
“This is outrageous,” Madeleine Grant said again as Tess headed for the foyer.
It was a calculated risk, walking away. Tess knew she could probably work through the LAPD if she had to, though it might be hard to get the e-mail messages from them without tipping off Michaelson. And, of course, there was the risk that Madeleine would follow through on her threat to report her to the Bureau. All in all, she would find it safer, easier, to work with Madeleine—but only if the woman stopped playing games.
Just past the threshold, Tess paused and dug a business card out of her coat. She handed it over. “If you decide to tell me everything, not just the sanitized version, let me know.”
“Sanitized version? You’re a disgrace to your profession.”
“So they keep telling me.”
Tess walked down the front steps, aware again of being stared at. But this time she had no doubt as to the source of the gaze.
6
Kolb cruised Hollywood Boulevard, surveying the crowds of moviegoers and club crawlers. The phone conversation had unsettled him. When he was restless, he often came here.
His headache was a cloud of pain drifting around his skull, a moving field that traveled with him. He steered his beat-up Oldsmobile through heavy traffic and exhaust fumes. The radio worked, but he never listened to it. He didn’t need some talk-show jackass telling him what to think.
This part of the Boulevard was a dirty stretch of shotgun flats—cheap motels and week-by-week lodgings, liquor stores, and adult video shops, and all the social detritus they attracted. With the windows of his car rolled down, he could hear the competing squalls of boom boxes and car radios, the laughter of kids congregating on street corners, the blare of sirens. Although LA had funneled millions into giving the Boulevard a face-lift, much of it remained a festering garbage dump, a dark lump of scar tissue in the heart of the city, as the city itself remained a hungry tumor in the heart of the world. Los Angeles, the new Babylon, the breeding ground of the cancer eating away at civilization.
Above him was the perfect illustration of his point, a lighted billboard promoting the latest Hollywood product, a teen sex comedy. The gigantic image of a nearly naked girl floated against the dark sky. Kolb knew the kind of movie it would be, a joyless thrill ride laced with coarse language and empty titillation, a diversion for pampered children who wanted some meaningless fun in their meaningless lives. Another chunk of offal dumped by this city into the sewage canals of modern culture to pollute a dying nation.
He idled at a red light next to a boosted-up Jeep blaring rap music. Behind the wheel, a kid in sunglasses bopped to the pounding beat.
Who was it who’d said that civilizations were born to war anthems and decayed to waltzes and minuets? Hell, maybe nobody had said it. Maybe he’d made it up himself. Anyway, it wasn’t exactly true. There were no waltzes anymore. America was rotting to the sound of ghetto slang rhymed and chanted at top volume.
Tenement noise for a nation of trash. Trash like the punks outside the Safeway and their tattooed whores. They came swarming into this country like termites infesting a half-dead tree, nesting in the dry wood and hastening the rot. He didn’t hate them for their skin color, only for the culture they brought with them, the ugly music and stinking food and loud, undisciplined, street-smart attitude. They humped like stray dogs, too. It was as if they were in a constant state of arousal, perpetual heat. Maybe the baggy pants they wore gave their genitals too much room to float around. Or maybe some unconscious survival drive was prodding them to reproduce so prodigiously that they could complete their takeover of the country by sheer numbers.
Decadence. A society in decline. The signs were everywhere, but only a few men had the courage to see.
The attempted rehabilitation of the Boulevard had involved removing the most visible elements from public view. Those would be the hookers, of course. Arrests had been made, sweeps had been carried out, and the upshot was that the girls in micro-minis had moved a block south to Selma Avenue, where they gathered in the same numbers as always.
Kolb hooked onto Selma and watched the girls give him the bump and grind. Their squawks and howls sounded like the shrieks of beggars in some feculent Third World alley. They were the female principle in distilled form, raw and desperate, and like all women they bore the shadow of something enigmatic and prehuman, some lingering primitivism that found expression in menstrual blood and the damp, secret darkness of the womb.
The whores disgusted him. The thought of putting his cock between their legs, inserting it into a soup of disease…He might as well try screwing a test tube full of bacteria.
Even so, he found himself inexplicably slowing the car, easing up to the curb. He leaned toward the open window on the passenger side and smiled at the girl who drew near.
“Want some action, honey?” she asked in a bored voice.
“What’ll it cost me?”
“You a cop?”
Not anymore, Kolb thought. “No way.”
“For twenty-five I can give you a suction job you won’t never forget. You want something more, or different, we can negotiate.”
“You clean?”
“What, you mean, like, drug-free or some shit?”
“No, I mean, you have any fucking diseases you’re going to give me?”
“You don’t get no diseases from a lube job, honey.”
That was bullshit. Any flesh-to-flesh contact posed a hazard. “You can get a disease from any goddamn thing.”
“I ain’t got no disease.”
“Sure you don’t.”
He looked at her in the glow of a streetlight. She couldn’t have hit thirty, but her face was already seamed with age. There were blisters on her lips, and her hair was thinning. The dim light and a layer of makeup could not conceal the film of sweat beading her skin. She repulsed him.
“You’re a goddamned walking disease,” he said, not raising his voice, “only you’re too fucking stupid to know it.”
She drew back. “Honey, I think we better call this thing off.”
“It was never on. You think I would let you touch me, a piece of filth like you?” He felt his lips skin back, baring his teeth. “A piece of fucking filth!”
Another of the girls heard him and started yapping in melodramatic outrage, and suddenly the whole crowd of hookers had focused on his car, screeching imprecations, pointing and hip thrusting. Their fury emboldened the whore with the blistered lips.
“Who you think you are?” she yelled. “God’s gift?”
Kolb smiled. “That’s right, bitch. That’s what I am. You have no fucking idea.”
He hit the gas and left her and the other whores behind, proud to be feeling nothing, no arousal, no need—nothing but the ache in his forehead, harsher than before.
Kolb headed home, taking a back route to frustrate any possible surveillance. He knew his partner would laugh at him for thinking he might be followed, but hell, he’d been arrested once, hadn’t he? Sometimes they really were out to get you.
As he drove, he looked around at the low-income residential streets lined with two-story apartment buildings, 1950s complexes with names like the Sunset Arms and the Hollywood Empress, buildings constructed around swimming pools and courtya
rds, on landscaped lots thick with date palms, buildings that had once been homes to middle-class families. Now they were hives where the filth of the city congregated, clustering together like roaches in a grease trap, playing their rap music and rutting like animals and breeding when they were fifteen, making more of their kind, crowding out men like him who had no place in the city they were populating. More and more of them every day, fording rivers, crossing deserts, riding into town concealed in the backs of delivery trucks, an ongoing invasion, a march of insects, like that movie he’d seen once, the one about the army of soldier ants that flowed forward in a flood tide, devouring everything in their path.
And no one would stop them. No one would criticize. No one would speak the truth, which was that the pattern of the world had been always that of masters and slaves—the elite to rule, the rest to be used as needed and disposed of when their value was exhausted. Past civilizations had crowned their warrior kings and left the rabble in shackles, but now it was the best of men who were penned up, made into milch cows and sacrificial animals, while the peasants ran free—
A blue van pulled out of a side street and cut him off.
He stomped on the brake and gave the other driver a long blast of his horn. The driver stuck his arm out the window and showed Kolb his middle finger.
Now, that just wasn’t nice. Kolb sped up, tailgating the van, his fist working the horn.
The driver of the van decided to act smart. He hit his brakes, trying to force a collision. Kolb swerved to avoid him, and headlights sprayed his face as brakes squealed. Some bitch in a sedan, traveling in the other direction, had nearly hit him head-on when he cut into her lane.
He saw her mouth working behind the windshield, yammering at him for getting in her way.
The van pulled away, but Kolb didn’t care. He had transferred his attention to the woman in the sedan.
He reversed down the street at high speed, then shifted into drive and shot forward, aiming his headlights at her car. Light flooded the sedan’s interior, and in the sudden brightness he could see the bitch’s expression change from hostility to panic. Everything slowed down, time congealing into a thick, clotted mass, and he was able to savor the fear on her face and the kick of adrenaline in his system. He saw her bending over the steering wheel, working the gear selector, finally punching the car into reverse and skidding partly out of his path just as his front end impacted hers.
There was a scream of shredding metal and a shower of pinwheeling sparks, and for a moment the two vehicles were locked together like two dogs in a fight, his Oldsmobile snarling like a pit bull with its jaws fastened on a rottweiler’s throat.
Then her car, still reversing, ripped free and fishtailed across the street, bumping up over a curb and spilling a line of trash cans onto the sidewalk. Her front fender had partially detached and was dragging on the street, her left headlight had gone dark, and it looked like one of the wheels was out of alignment because of some damage to the axle, but she got the car going and sped away.
He glimpsed her as she flashed past him, her head low, shoulders hunched, hands fisted on the steering wheel, a picture of terror, and he laid his palm on the horn and gave her a parting salute.
He thought about following her and maybe doing some more damage, maybe cornering her on a dead-end street and plowing into the car and smashing her against the dashboard and leaving her to bleed to death like roadkill.
No. It wouldn’t be smart to do that. Probably hadn’t been too smart to get involved in the altercation in the first place.
But what the hell, he’d needed to let off some steam.
And he could bet that some dumb bitch driving in this shitty neighborhood, probably without insurance, maybe without a license, wasn’t going to report anything to the police. Even if she did, she hadn’t had time to get his tag number or any kind of decent description.
Nobody was going to listen to her, anyway. This was the big city. Serious crimes took place here on a daily basis. Who cared about some bimbo who got her transmission banged up? He’d been a cop. If she’d come to him for help, he would have taken the report just to keep her quiet, and after she was gone, he would have chucked it in the trash. Some people didn’t deserve police protection.
He drove away from the scene. The bitch’s sedan had gotten the worst of the encounter, but his Olds had sustained some damage. Funny thing, when he’d been revved up in the heat of the moment, it hadn’t occurred to him that his car could suffer in the collision. Now it was making a clunking noise, and there was a loose rattling sound coming from under the hood.
What pissed him off was that it wasn’t even his fault. What the hell was he supposed to do when she’d dared to honk her horn at him, glare at him, make faces like an ape in a cage?
Of course, it was the scumbag in the van who’d started it by giving him the finger. Maybe if he’d stayed focused on the van driver, gone after him…
He shook his head. Wouldn’t have made any difference. No matter what price either driver paid, it wouldn’t have made him feel better.
They weren’t the real problem.
It was McCallum. She was the reason he’d gone driving.
He’d been able to forget about her—almost forget—when she was in Denver, a thousand miles away. Now she was here in LA. She had come to his territory, almost as if she was meant for him. And because there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about her, he’d lost his composure, and now he had a busted-up car to show for it.
Life sucked sometimes. And to top it all off, his headache was worse than before.
7
Tess was surprised that her hotel room was still available. Because she was checking in at eight fifteen, she’d expected her reservation to be lost, giving her an excuse to relocate. The desk clerk disappointed her with his reliability. The MiraMist had been told to expect a late arrival. At least the room waiting for her wasn’t 1625, the crime scene in the Mobius case.
A bellhop escorted her to the seventh floor and reviewed the room’s amenities, admitting only when asked that there was a daily eight-dollar charge for opening the minibar, whether or not its contents were consumed. The room was on Michaelson’s tab. Tess made a mental note to open the minibar every day.
With the drapes parted to reveal a view of the moonlit ocean beyond the palisades, she unpacked her two carry-ons. One was filled with clothing and toiletries, while the other contained her laptop and various documents from Denver. She carried nothing more personal—no photos of loved ones, no mementoes of her private life. She hadn’t had much of a private life in a long time.
She remembered when she’d been new at this, excited to be a genuine agent of the FBI. That was only twelve years ago, but felt longer. Now she was thirty-seven, unmarried. She had given all she had to the Bureau. She had given even the man she loved, Special Agent Paul Voorhees, killed by Mobius in a Denver suburb.
Had it been worth it? She couldn’t say. Perhaps she didn’t want to make that judgment because she knew what it would be.
Her cell phone rang. It had to be Michaelson, chiding her for walking out on his media spectacle.
Wrong again. The voice on the line was Madeleine Grant’s. “Agent McCallum? I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
Tess waited. It seemed unusual for a woman like Madeleine to change her mind so quickly.
“You were right,” she went on. “I didn’t give you all the information. There were certain matters I wasn’t at liberty to discuss.”
“At liberty?”
“It will all be explained. And you can have those e-mail messages I wanted to give you.”
“All right. If you want me to come back to your place—”
“That won’t be necessary. Where are you staying?”
“Santa Monica. Near the ocean.”
“There’s a coffee shop just a few blocks inland at Pico Boulevard and Tenth Street. The Boiler Room, it’s called.”
“The Boiler Room?” Tess repeated, c
ertain she’d heard wrong. It hardly sounded like Madeleine’s kind of place.
“Can you be there in fifteen minutes?”
Tess said yes and ended the call. Madeleine’s sudden turnaround was intriguing, but something about it didn’t feel right. And there was that odd phrase of hers—certain matters I wasn’t at liberty to discuss. Madeleine Grant didn’t seem like a person who would be restricted by anyone else’s rules.
Tess left the hotel room, taking her cell phone and her gun.
A lighted sign spelling out THE BOILER ROOM in neon italics shone over a striped canopy and a small huddle of vagrants cadging change. Through the front windows, people could be seen sharing booths and sipping milkshakes. From what Tess could tell, nothing about the diner’s décor had changed in at least forty years.
She stepped inside, taking a moment to adjust to the glare. The place was done up in white Formica counters, Naugahyde benches, and sleepy ceiling fans. The smell of hamburger hung in the air, reminding her that she’d had no dinner. She’d thought about ordering something from room service or scavenging in the minibar. Now she wouldn’t have to.
About half the seats were occupied, a pretty good turnout on a Monday night at this hour. There were scattered couples catching a bite after a movie or a walk on the beach, a few solitary men who looked lonely, a slender kid in a baseball cap working hard on a pinball machine in the corner.
Madeleine Grant wasn’t here. Tess wondered if the woman had changed her mind about showing up. Well, she would wait long enough to have a burger, anyway.
She took a seat in a booth away from the windows—an old precaution, not to be seen from the street. She positioned herself with a view of the entrance so Madeleine wouldn’t surprise her if she walked in.
She flipped open the menu, skimming the items without interest, since she knew in advance what she was going to have.
A waitress arrived. Tess put down her menu to order. Only it wasn’t a waitress, after all, but another customer, a woman Tess didn’t know, who slipped into the bench seat opposite her own.
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