He got back behind the wheel and just sat for a moment, turning the heater up to full blast and letting it blow onto his hands. He flexed the fingers, getting the feeling back into them.
Then he stuck his left hand on the wheel and turned in the seat to watch behind him. He put the car in gear and stepped down on the gas, giving it slow and steady pressure and watching the line. He knew the rope wouldn’t break—it was half-inch nylon—but he wasn’t so sure about his knot.
R.J. held his breath as the car eased forward a few inches. Something heaved under the surface of the river as the water churned and turned even darker. R.J. thought he saw a metallic flash, but it might have been just a reflection off the water.
Then the car’s tires hit a slick spot and began to spin. The rope slackened a little. R.J. tried rocking the car, tapping the pedal in short bursts, but quickly gave it up when he saw that he wasn’t going anywhere.
R.J. pushed the gear lever into Park and got out.
He grabbed up the dead branch he had hauled out and wedged it under the drive wheel. The branch was sure turning out to be handy. I should carry one with me from now on, he thought.
Back behind the wheel he gave the gas slow, steady pressure. The car moved forward over the slick spot. The tires kept gripping and he inched forward.
Now he was sure. It was no reflection from the water. He had hooked something shiny.
He moved forward slowly, steadily, until the something hit the shallows and broke water. Then it lurched and bumped up onto the bank and lay there while R.J. got out and went down to look at it.
It was a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Big one.
CHAPTER 37
“The bike is registered to a member of the Devil Hoggs Motorcycle Club. His name is Burton Weisbrod,” Trooper Bentt told R.J. “But nobody really knows that. They call him Jingo.”
Bentt threw a folder on the desk of Schmidt’s office. “His common-law wife reported him missing last week. She thought he was skipping out on child support.”
“He is,” R.J. said. “The hard way.”
“I’ve talked to a judge,” Captain Schmidt said, still without showing any emotion. “He’s giving me a court order for an exhumation of the body of William Kelley.” He nodded one time, at R.J. or at the folder. Maybe both. “I think we’ll find it’s Weisbrod.”
“You’re a good cop, Captain,” R.J. said. “Think you can work a transfer to Manhattan Homicide?”
Schmidt shook his head and looked up at Brent. “Nope,” he said. “I like the cows.”
By the time R.J. got back to the city it was dark.
He turned in his rental car and took the opportunity to walk the mile or so back to his apartment. New York was his city and he had missed it.
There were still crowds pushing through the streets. Going to dinner, or coming back from dinner. Trying to get in a few last-minute deals. Scrambling for a buck, hurrying to meet somebody. Hustling one last victory, for love or money, wrestling satisfaction from the city.
There was always an incredible energy in the city. Not in the California sense of aura, but real, literal energy. It made you feel clearheaded and tireless.
Just being here made R.J. walk faster, think harder, work a little quicker. It was why he had moved here and made it his home so many years ago. The way it made the blood pound through his veins—The first time he felt it, he couldn’t believe he’d lived so long without that feeling. It was like realizing he’d been only half alive all those years.
Something emanated from the pavement, made everybody move a little faster. And in spring it got stronger, as if the melting slush was letting it out after five months of cold storage.
You almost didn’t need to sleep if you lived in Manhattan.
R.J. didn’t want to think about going back to California. It was like being forced to take a nap when you really wanted to play baseball.
But he was going back, he knew that. He had to stop Kelley. He didn’t want to; Janine Wright had it coming, if anybody did. She’d taken away R.J.’s past with the remake, and his future with Casey.
Whatever future that might be. He hadn’t had time to think about what was going on between them, and he still didn’t. But now, working his way along the Manhattan sidewalk, he wondered what he would do if he had to choose between Casey and New York.
It could happen. Whatever happened with the remake, Casey had sipped from the big bottle of show biz. It was an addictive brew, R.J. knew. She might not want to come home.
She might decide to make her career there, in Hollywood, in a place and an occupation R.J. had left behind him forever. He’d had to leave it behind, or he knew he’d turn into something he wouldn’t want to share a bus ride with.
So what if she stayed? What then? Could he tell her so long? No hard feelings? It’s been swell, drop me a line sometime?
Could he say good-bye to her?
Could he say it to New York?
He didn’t want to choose, wasn’t sure he could. But it seemed like that was the way things generally shaped up. A month ago he’d been riding high and now—
A half second before the guy bumped into him R.J. noticed the smell. It was a cross between patchouli oil and a bus station urinal.
Then he was grunting from the impact of a shoulder in his chest and an elbow in his gut.
When he straightened up, he found an intense-looking bearded guy with matted hair, staring him down with hard, bright eyes. He was crusted over with dirt and something else that made the dirt look clean and wholesome. He looked like a walking scab.
“Now I’ve got your attention,” the guy said, “are you ready to hear the word?” And he held up a Bible almost as crusty as he was.
“I’ve heard the word,” R.J. said. “It’s syzygy.”
The scab shook his head. A small clot of something fell off his head and onto his shoulder. It moved.
“Don’t fight it,” he said. “Open yourself and be free.”
“I can’t open yet,” R.J. told him. “I’m still remodeling.” R.J. pushed on past, shaking his head.
The guy started preaching anyway, and his voice followed R.J. for two blocks, rising and falling and flailing at the ears of all the people on the sidewalk. The people just shrugged him off, one or two nudging him a little harder than usual as they passed.
R.J. grinned and shook his head. For a moment or two he forgot all about Kelley and Casey and California, swept away again by another of those little surprises the city always threw at you.
How could he leave this place?
How could he go back to California, to that desert where nothing could live or grow?
He wasn’t sure he could do it. He was like a junkie, and without the rush he got from Manhattan—
And Casey? Was it worth living here without her? She’d become part of what he loved about his city. In some ways, she represented the spirit of New York to R.J. Beautiful and classy and at the same time, kick-you-in-the-balls tough.
And if she stayed out there long enough, that would be gone, too. She would become somebody else. Somebody who made deals on a cellular phone from the driver’s seat of a convertible.
That wasn’t the Casey he knew. She didn’t belong there, and neither did he.
Anyway, he had to go back, for a little while. He just wasn’t going back alone.
Ilsa was glad to see him again. Or she said she was, until R.J. got a bowl of food down onto the floor for her. Then she let him know that she was deeply disappointed in his recent lack of character.
His apartment felt strangely dead after the cold of that Connecticut river bank and the hustling crowd in the street. He sat on the sofa for a second, just trying to collect himself. Then he picked up the phone and dialed.
“Hello, Bob,” he said to the quietly hostile voice that answered. “I need to talk to Mary.”
R.J. could hear the breath hiss out of Roberta. She didn’t say anything, just hissed. But she put the phone down extra-har
d and R.J. had to rub his ear to get the feeling back into it.
R.J. heard footsteps retreating, mumbling, then faster, lighter feet returning. In a moment Mary picked up.
“Hello? R.J.? Is it really you?” She sounded breathless. Maybe weary and older, too, but like she had hurried when she found out it was him.
“It’s me,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”
“Is it—anything about Mother?”
“No. But it’s something I’d rather tell you to your face.”
“Oh—I could meet you somewhere.” She lowered her voice to something just above a whisper. “Roberta doesn’t want you here.”
“That’s one of the things I want to talk to you about,” R.J. said. “Have you eaten yet?”
CHAPTER 38
He met her at Ferrini’s. He had started to think of it as their place, and anyway the kid knew where it was. Besides, there was no place like it in Los Angeles, and he was on his way back there, all too soon.
It was night, so Ferrini himself was at the door. He didn’t sing arias when he saw them; after all, he was the owner, and he had a big mustache whose dignity he had to protect.
But he did give R.J. a small bow and a slight smile of recognition, and he led them himself to a good table.
R.J. let Ferrini seat Mary, using the time to study her. She still looked better than any other woman in the place, R.J. thought. But she had lost some weight, and she couldn’t really afford to. There were bags under her eyes that her clumsy makeup couldn’t hide. Even her hair was slightly off. It looked a little bit like a wig that didn’t quite fit and wasn’t properly cared for.
Mary glanced up and caught him staring. She blushed; even in the dim light R.J. could see the flush spread over her face.
He smiled. “You look good, kid,” he told her.
She shook her head with a small, tight movement. “No, I don’t. I look awful. But that’s—” She fluttered a hand at him. “I feel like… I don’t know. The walls close in on me in Roberta’s apartment, but I can’t do anything about it. I just sit there with the TV on, but I don’t—I can’t concentrate on anything and—Just…trapped.”
“You need to get out of there. Get yourself to some place else, do something to get back together again.”
“I don’t—How? What?”
R.J. reached across the table and patted her hand. “I know it seems like you can’t move or do anything. But you can. And when you do, you’ll find that things will start to shape up again.” He looked at her carefully before he went on. She seemed to be a little better. “I want you to come to California with me.”
She jerked upright, nearly spilling her water glass. “That’s—What do you mean? Back to Mother?”
“No. Relax, I’m not shilling for your mother. You can stay as far away from her as you want. In fact, I recommend it. But something’s come up and I want you there for it. I may need you there.”
“What’s come up? I can’t—What kind of thing could I possibly help with?”
“I think your father’s alive, Mary.”
Mary blinked at him once. Then she fell out of her chair in a dead faint and hit the floor with a soft thump.
When a pretty girl faints in an Italian restaurant, the result is somewhere between a soap opera and a circus. For the next few minutes R.J. watched as everyone, from Ferrini himself to the cook on down to the busboy, raced around, calling out loudly and bringing dozens of glasses of water, cool wet cloths, small beakers of grappa—they even found some smelling salts somewhere.
And they all managed to find a moment to glare at R.J. with strong disapproval. After all, he must have done something to the poor girl.
In fact, the busboy, who was young and not too sophisticated, mumbled, “Bruto,” as he cleared away the spilled water glass.
R.J. took it all without worrying too much, once he was sure that the kid was okay. He would find a quiet moment someday soon and ask Angelo Bertelli to explain to Ferrini what had happened. It would probably be good for a free glass of wine next time he came in. Which he wouldn’t drink. But what the hell.
Either it wasn’t much of a faint or Mary was a lot more resilient than any other fainter R.J. had ever seen. It was only ten minutes later that she was propped up in her chair, sipping a glass of acqua minerale. She was still as pale as you can get unless you’re in a vampire movie, but she was coping.
“All right,” she said at last, taking in a big breath and closing her eyes for a second. “What’s this about my father?”
R.J. looked at her carefully before speaking.
She shook her head slightly, just enough to toss back a small wing of hair that had fallen across her face. “Relax,” she said, with a trace of her old toughness, “I’m not going to pull another flop on you.”
“That’s good,” R.J. said. “From the looks I’ve been getting, I’d say the staff here will put me under the end zone at the Meadowlands if I make you faint again.”
“My father,” she said. “You said you think he might be…alive?”
“Yeah. That’s right. I could be wrong.”
“But why do you think he is alive?”
She was starting to breathe a little too fast again and R.J. put his hand across the table and grabbed her wrist. “Listen,” he said. “This isn’t all good news. In some ways it would be better if all this was over and he was really dead.”
She pulled her hand away and shook her head. “Dead is never better,” she said.
“Sure it is,” he said. “If you want to remember a father who was a sweet and caring man, an innocent victim of your awful mother. Because if he’s alive, he’s a killer. A bad one. And he’s getting ready to kill again.”
“That doesn’t matter. He’s my father. If he’s alive, I just want to see him.”
R.J. looked at her across the table. Even in the dim light of the restaurant he could see something in her face he hadn’t seen before. It was a look that said, as long as I get what I want, I don’t care how high the bodies stack up. It was exactly the same thing he’d seen in her mother, Janine Wright.
He shook his head. It probably wasn’t a great idea to tell her that. “All right, kid,” he said instead. “But you might not like what you see.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she repeated.
“Maybe it doesn’t. How soon can you be ready to leave?”
She stood up. “I’m ready now.”
CHAPTER 39
It was just another plane ride.
R.J. had never noticed it before, but the flight attendants treated a man a lot different if he was flying with a woman. Especially if she was young and pretty. He’d probably failed to notice because he’d almost never flown with a woman before. Except Belle, years ago. And when he had been with her, nobody noticed him no matter what.
So it was different now. They still brought him the awful snack and offered to sell him earphones for the terrible movie. But the smiles were a little more mechanical. And they didn’t give his seatbelt an extra tug to make sure it was snug.
And all because Mary was sitting there beside him. It was funny. Women put boundary markers out on their property to warn away other women. Even when it wasn’t their property. More like planets and spheres of influence. R.J. was in Mary’s orbit, and the flight attendant had to whirl away to check some other guy’s seatbelt.
Not that Mary was doing anything. She sat straight up in her chair for almost the whole flight. She would glance out the window every now and then, as if to be sure that the plane was still in the air and headed in the right direction. But that was it. She didn’t eat her awful “snack.” R.J. took her cookie.
She didn’t talk. She didn’t seem to want to do anything but get there.
In fact, for R.J. it was almost like flying alone. Except for the thing with the flight attendant.
Somewhere over the Rocky Mountains R.J. felt a soft, warm weight on his shoulder. Mary had fallen asleep. Her face had dropped down onto him. It was a prett
y good face. In sleep a lot of the worry had slid off it and she looked like what she was again, a pretty kid.
R.J. had an impulse to touch that face, stroke it with his fingertips, brush away a strand of hair. But there was no strand of hair, and if he touched her face he might not stop there.
R.J. blinked. What the hell was he thinking? Was he attracted to this kid? Was he in male menopause, thinking about somebody young enough to be his daughter? Had his frustrations with Casey made him totally nuts?
Not that this was a bad package. Just that the idea of getting involved with anybody that age—she really was only a little older than his son, for Christ’s sake!
Maybe that was it. Maybe he was just feeling a kind of fatherly affection. Sure, that was it. Probably fathers admire their daughters’ legs all the time.
He realized that the last few times he had seen Mary there had been a subtle attraction working between them. He had laughed at Roberta’s outburst, Keep your hands off her, but now he wondered. Had she seen something he hadn’t? Was there something going on here? Was Mary aware of it—was she actually manipulating it? Christ, did she have a crush on him?
R.J. shook his head. This was rushing him from left field. Maybe he was losing his grip to let a thing like this surprise him. Whatever. He had more important things to worry about. When he’d quit drinking, and then quit smoking, he’d faced down temptation with a capital T. If he couldn’t handle a kid with a crush at this stage in his life, he was hopeless.
But the rest of the trip his mind kept whirling between Casey, Mary, and Kelley. He couldn’t keep them separated long enough to figure any of them out.
His arm fell asleep from the weight of Mary’s head on the shoulder. He let them both sleep, and before long they were circling the airport and Mary was blinking herself awake.
Henry Portillo was waiting for them at the gate. He raised an eyebrow when he saw Mary and gave R.J. one of his significant looks.
Portillo had the idea that R.J. was some kind of smooth-talking satyr and R.J. had never been able to talk him out of it. Portillo, with his old-fashioned sense of what was proper, seemed to believe that R.J. spent all his waking hours chasing after anything in skirts.
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