‘Yeah. I remember now,’ the uniform said.
Reddick remained silent.
‘They got into it out in the parking lot. The biker almost ran her over on his way out and she said something to him, got his ass all bent out of shape.’
Reddick still didn’t say anything.
‘As I recall, though, he never actually touched her. Just threatened to punch her lights out, or something along those lines.’
‘That was enough.’
‘You almost killed the man, Mr Reddick.’
Reddick shrugged. ‘He said he was gonna knock her teeth out. If he was just talking to hear himself speak, he picked the wrong day to do it.’
The cop nodded, studied him in silence for a moment. ‘Like this kid tonight. Guess he picked the wrong night to knock your kid down, too.’
Reddick shrugged again, still offering no apologies. ‘I guess so.’
They had just been horsing around. Three body-pierced skinheads in their late teens, white skin translucent as tissue paper, forearms and biceps stained blue with tattoos, pushing and shoving each other like drunken sailors as they stood in one of two long order lines at a Glendale McDonald’s, just after ten on a Saturday night. Their language was blistering, an endless onslaught of ‘fuck yous’ and ‘motherfuckers’ that could have peeled paint from the walls, but their routine was being tolerated until one of them threw an elbow out, knocked a drink off a woman’s tray as she tried to ease past. Orange soda exploded across the floor like liquid shrapnel and the restaurant’s manager finally appeared, made a brave if ill-fated attempt to usher the trio out.
He was a mousy looking East Indian with a long neck and a bald, luminescent pate, and the skinheads showed him all the respect his mild appearance demanded. Which was to say, they laughed in his face, told him to get his ‘black nigger ass’ back behind the counter before they had to put their collective foot in it. Then, just to clarify their point, the largest of the three put his hands full in the manager’s chest, shoved him backward into the group of people still standing in line behind him.
Reddick’s son Jake hit the floor beneath the Indian’s weight like a blindsided quarterback, the back of his head making an audible whack as it smacked off the hard linoleum.
And then the big skinhead laughed.
He never saw Reddick coming, a rocket launched from a nearby table, so he couldn’t anticipate the overhand right Reddick threw at him, caving in the left side of his face like a papier mâché construct. The kid’s friends watched him go down in a heap, blood spewing between his fingers as his hands went instinctively to his nose, and never thought twice about retaliation. They could see in Reddick’s eyes that he was hoping they’d try it, give him any excuse to go after them, too.
Afterward, in the deafening silence that took over the restaurant, every customer in attendance had gazed at Reddick in open horror, as if he were something wild that had wandered in off the street to attack and feed off the innocent.
It was a reaction to which Reddick was no stranger.
‘You don’t think you might have overreacted a little?’ the uniform asked now. ‘I mean, this kid you hit’s no Boy Scout, I grant you, but he didn’t intend—’
‘I don’t give a damn what he intended,’ Reddick said. ‘He hurt a five-year-old boy during the commission of an assault. Damn near broke his neck. Far as I’m concerned, he got off easy.’
The cop fell silent again, in an awkward spot. He was professionally obligated to admonish Reddick, to make some concerted effort to condemn his attack on an unarmed man damn near half his age, but his heart clearly wasn’t in it. Reddick knew the nature of his confliction, because he’d seen it in others before: Just as he had out at Castaic Lake six months ago, the uniform probably admired him. If he had a wife and kids of his own, how could he not envy the zeal with which Reddick seemed determined to defend his family from all the scumbags of the earth?
‘Tell you what, Mr Reddick,’ the cop said eventually, closing his little notebook up to announce that he was all through asking questions. ‘We’re gonna let you go. Again. The kid wants to sue you in civil court later, that’s his privilege, but I’m not gonna bust you for protecting your boy from someone who, as you just pointed out, was in the act of committing an assault of his own.’
Reddick waited for the ‘but.’
‘But I’d like to offer you a little bit of advice, if I may.’ He fixed his eyes on Reddick’s, made sure he had his full attention before going on. ‘You know that expression “chill out”? I think you’d better learn how to do that. Because if this sort of thing happens to you as often as I think it does . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Sooner or later, the wrong people are gonna get hurt. It’s only a matter of time.’
Thirty minutes later, Dana took her own turn making Reddick feel like an ass.
Dropping their son off at home at the ungodly hour of one a.m. had been an easy tip-off that something had gone wrong. Reddick could be irresponsible, but never where Jake was concerned. That much, at least, she knew about him.
‘What happened, Joe?’ she asked, after he had laid the sleeping boy down in his bed and she had escorted Reddick back to the door, like a prison guard showing an inmate the way back to his cell.
‘Nothing,’ Reddick said. ‘The movie ran late and we ate after instead of before. I should’ve called, but I didn’t. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re lying,’ Dana said.
Reddick stared at her, his cheeks burning. Eight years his junior at thirty-three, his estranged second wife was a big-boned, auburn-haired beauty whose luminous green eyes had always disarmed him, but never more so than at times like this, when he was trying to feed her a line. So he cut to the chase, gave her a short version of the evening’s events, doing what he could to make them sound innocuous. She wasn’t fooled one bit.
‘Jesus, Joe,’ she said.
‘Yeah, I know. Same old Red. Thank God he’s soon to be your ex, huh?’
‘Don’t do that. Don’t start talking about us when we were talking about you.’
‘Let it go, Dana. No damage was done, all right?’
‘You can’t go on this way, Joe. You need to start seeing Dr Elkins again. If you don’t—’
‘Hey, I’ve gotta go. Do me a favor, tell Jake I’ll call him tomorrow or Monday, come by to see him again next week. OK?’
He turned to leave and Dana let him, both of them lacking the energy to resume their favorite pastime of late, arguing endlessly over things that would never change. She had disappeared inside the house before he could even back his car out of the driveway.
The five-mile drive to Reddick’s apartment in Echo Park was a long one. He deliberately took the surface streets to extend it, to give himself time to gear down before any attempt at sleep could prove futile. He even put the radio on, scanned the dial until he found an FM station playing the most sedate pseudo-jazz imaginable.
But his mind raced helter-skelter all the same.
He’d come a long way in nine years. That much was irrefutable. The recurring nightmare that had chased him out of Florida rarely visited him anymore, and when it did, he could deal with it, shake off its effects before he did something stupid to make the pain go away. He had some semblance of self-control now.
But in many ways, he was still damaged goods. Just another crazy waiting for his next dark impulse to come unglued. That he had been moved to violence tonight by more noble motives than usual did little to change this fact.
Still, Reddick was all but unrepentant. A return to normalcy would have been nice, but normalcy had its drawbacks. Complacency, in particular. Belief in the idea that nothing bad ever happened to those who didn’t somehow ask for it, either by omission or commission. Or that the safety and security of the people you loved was something you could purchase with cold, hard cash, rather than forge in blood, time and time again. These were all mere delusions, lies people told themselves to give them comfort at night, and every day they cost some poor basta
rd dearly.
But not Reddick. Reddick was one of the enlightened. And being enlightened, he felt little fear, because now he knew what was necessary to hold on to what was his, to keep those who peopled his private little universe out of harm’s way: Vigilance. Constant vigilance. That, and a ready and unapologetic willingness to do unto others long before they could do unto those he loved. Reddick’s rule to live by was a simple one: No one hurt his family for free, ever – and nothing would ever make him abandon it. Not Dana’s threats of divorce, not being separated from his son – nothing.
He had been burned once. It would never happen to him again.
With home less than five minutes away, Reddick sped south through a yellow light on Fletcher Drive just before the Glendale Freeway exit ramp, saw nothing but clear sailing ahead and then a white van on his right came out of nowhere to leap into his path.
Reddick stood on his brakes and turned his wheel hard left to avoid the collision, sending his Mustang across the double yellow line dissecting the street. Conversely, the driver of the white Chrysler hit the gas, burned rubber in his own quest to keep the two vehicles apart. But both men were attempting the impossible. Inevitably, the Ford and Chrysler slammed together, right headlight to left rear quarter panel, then skidded to a halt, both gouged and dented but otherwise intact.
Reddick’s Mustang sat there making ticking noises on the wrong side of the street, the stench of burning rubber thick in his nose.
‘Crazy sonofabitch!’
He looked over at the van, wired with adrenaline, watched in amazement as, its engine still running, it began to roll forward and then accelerated.
The guy wasn’t going to stop.
Incredulous, Reddick restarted the Mustang, slammed it into gear, and mashed on the gas to go after the idiot.
It only took him forty seconds to catch up with him.
Driving home less than a half-hour later, hands still slick with sweat, Andy Baumhower knew he was in big trouble.
It would have been inaccurate to say he was surprised, however, because he’d been waiting for disaster to strike all night. Disaster was the fate of all amateur felons eventually, and that was what Baumhower was tonight, an amateur. Just a white collar criminal playing a big league game. If he hadn’t fucked up by causing an ill-timed car accident, he would’ve found some other way to do it.
Still, he considered himself lucky. He’d managed to escape from this guy Reddick, the Mustang’s driver, without having to deal with the police. They had exchanged addresses and phone numbers, and insurance and driver’s license info, and that was it. The damage to both vehicles had been minimal and no one, thank God, had been hurt. Reddick had wanted to call the cops anyway, enraged by Baumhower’s foolish attempt at hit-and-run, but Baumhower had talked him out of it, playing the remorseful, apologetic sop who couldn’t afford another hike in his insurance rates to the hilt.
Not that Reddick had been an easy sell. He’d no more bought Baumhower’s reasons for not wanting the police involved than he had the younger man’s explanation for why he’d been where he was when the accident occurred: coming off an LA River access road that should have been closed to the public. Baumhower had said he’d mistaken the dark access road for an on-ramp to the adjacent Glendale Freeway and quickly reversed his field, not bothering to watch for opposing traffic upon re-entry to Fletcher Drive. Reddick hadn’t asked him to elaborate, just accepted his story in silence, but Baumhower could tell he wasn’t fooled. He’d only acted like he was for reasons of his own.
Which was why Baumhower was worried now, sweaty palms sliding all over the wounded van’s wheel as he raced home to Chatsworth. The feeling Reddick had left him with was that he wasn’t a man easily duped. That he had seen through Baumhower like an open window and would come back to haunt him later. Maybe even as early as tomorrow.
When Baumhower would have to explain to his three accomplices why they should have never asked him to dispose of Gillis Rainey’s body in the first place.
TWO
That night, as Reddick might have guessed it would, the nightmare revisited him. Beginning, as always, in his old green Pontiac, rolling through a dark Florida landscape toward home . . .
. . . and from his first sight of the house, he knows something is wrong.
It’s a few minutes past ten on a Wednesday evening in November, the end of a long day. Just short of twenty miles and a seemingly interminable drive north of downtown West Palm Beach, the sleepy suburb of Lake Park is cold beneath a black, disinterested sky, and the short little cul-de-sac which the Reddick home terminates is empty and silent, devoid of life. Kaye’s station wagon, a Mercury Sable in gun-metal gray, is in the driveway out front, where he has come to expect it, but the house is pitch black, and this is the aberration that alarms him immediately.
Because he knows Kaye has no patience for the dark.
The demented sadist she had for a father once locked her in a closet as a small child, to punish her for crying too long and too hard over something she has never been able to recall, and she has spent half her life surrounding herself with light ever since. By the time the sun has fully set each day, she has already made her rounds, moving from room to room to illuminate the house, repelling the forces of darkness with all the singlemindedness of a priest performing an exorcism. It is an eccentricity she seems powerless to contain, and, in fact, never has in all the nine years she and Reddick have been married.
Until now.
Jumping out of his old Firebird, its feeble and unwilling engine having died of its own volition before he could actually kill the ignition, Reddick rushes to his front door, fumbling with his heavy ring of keys, and is relieved to find the door locked and deadbolted, showing no sign of forced entry. Rational explanations for the darkened house only now begin to occur to him. In the time it takes to open the door and step inside, he convinces himself that his fears are unfounded, that Joe Reddick the cop has yet again brought his job home and overreacted to harmless, after-hours stimuli. If the problem battery in the wagon outside has finally gone dead on her, Reddick can, with a little imagination, see Kaye picking the kids up from school in a neighbor’s car and taking them shopping afterward, losing all track of time. Or finally blowing a fuse with her nightly 6,000-watt light show and, having no idea how or where to change it, staying at a friend’s house until Reddick can come home from work to do it himself.
Only a few seconds inside the house, however, he knows such optimistic speculation is but wishful thinking. Reddick has smelled blood before, too many times to mistake it for anything else, and its telltale stench is here, filling the darkness before him with an undeniable warning of things to come. He tests the wall switch nearby, determined to prove his instincts wrong, but instead only confirms their reliability when the foyer is flooded with light.
As a dizzying swell of nausea quickly begins to overtake him, he calls out at last, his voice barely recognizable as his own:
‘Kaye!’
He finds her in the living room. Laying face down, half-naked, on the floor, blood staining the shag carpet beneath her like black dye. The hilt of a large kitchen knife protrudes from the back of her neck.
Reddick retches into his open hands, blinking back tears that burn like ammonia, then races without thinking up the stairs to look for his children. Halfway up the blood-dappled staircase—
He woke up. Mouth open but silent, a fistful of bed sheet in each hand.
He was rigid with fear and his breathing was ragged, but he wasn’t screaming. He had learned to stop screaming long ago. The mattress beneath him was soaked with sweat. He looked at the clock on his bedside table, saw that it was only four a.m. He hadn’t been asleep more than two hours.
Once upon a time, there had been no rhyme or reason to the timing of the nightmare’s appearances. It came and went as it pleased, requiring no inducement to show itself. But no more. Nine years and two shrinks had at least seen to that. Now when the dream came to him, it was as a r
eflex action, a delayed response to some sudden anxiety. A deep sense of guilt or rage; even sexual excitement could sometimes precipitate the nightmare’s invasions of his sleep.
This time it was fear.
Or at least, the odd sensation that trouble, in one shape or another, lay just ahead. Good cops learned to sense trouble coming from miles away and Reddick was no exception. Even after years away from the job, his instincts about such things remained unassailable.
This guy Baumhower, the dickhead in the white Chrysler van tonight, had been bad news. His story about why he’d come flying off that LA River access road the way he had was bullshit, and there’d been more to his reluctance to file a police report than any fear of having his insurance rates go up. A stone-cold killer the guy wasn’t – he was too much of a wuss for that – but Reddick was fairly certain that, whatever he’d been doing just prior to plowing his van into Reddick’s Mustang, it had probably been something a real cop might want to investigate.
Why he should have cared what the truth was, no longer being a real cop himself, Reddick didn’t know. His only interest in Baumhower now should have been a check from him for the damages to his car, plus any medical expenses he might incur later. And yet, Reddick couldn’t shake the feeling that Baumhower was an omen of some kind. The tip of some disastrous iceberg that would soon be in his path.
And he worried that this would not be the last restless night he endured on the little asshole’s account.
THREE
‘For Chrissake, Perry, let me kill the dumb fuck,’ Ben Clarke said. ‘Please.’
Clarke was sitting in one of the two leather chairs opposite Perry Cross’s office desk, glaring at Andy Baumhower with what could only be described as utter contempt. Clarke was a big man with a flat, linebacker’s face, and when he scowled, his black eyes all but disappeared beneath the overhang of his slab-like brow. It was a countenance that had to be seen to be properly appreciated.
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