by Stuart Woods
Larsen moved his head, and the effort hurt; he couldn’t seem to move anything else. He tried to roll over onto his back, and that didn’t work, either; something was in his way. His hands and feet were bound, and there was tape over his mouth and eyes. He didn’t know where he was. He was fully conscious now, and he thought it wise to listen for a while before trying to move again. Silence. Where the hell was he, and why was he bound and gagged? He struggled to remember what had happened to him.
Danny stopped the car in front of the Millman house.
“Can you see the guest house?” Chris asked.
“No, just the main house; it must be down the driveway.”
“Then drive down there.”
“Chris, we don’t know what’s going on here.”
“Just put your lights on bright so that anybody can see we’re coming, and drive straight to the guest house.”
“Chris…”
“I know this is the right thing to do, Danny.”
Danny turned the car into the driveway, put his headlights on bright, and began driving. The guest house came into view dead ahead; no lights were on, and no car was in the carport. “It looks deserted,” he said.
“Pull up to the house and leave your headlights on,” she said.
Danny did as he was told.
“Now see if you can get into the place.”
“Okay, if you say so.”
“Wait a minute.” She retrieved her pistol and pressed it into his hand.
“Listen, I don’t know anything about guns.”
“Take it; just press down this safety, and it’s ready to fire.”
“I think we ought to go home and call the police, Chris.”
“Danny, please. Do this for me.”
Danny got out of the car and approached the house. He peered in through the window, but saw nothing but furniture. “It still looks deserted,” he called to Chris.
Chris opened the car door and got out. “Try the front door,” she called.
Danny turned the knob and pushed; the door opened easily. “The door is open.”
“See if you can find a light.” Chris was walking gingerly toward Danny’s voice.
“There’s no switch, but I can see a lamp by the sofa.” Danny walked into the room toward the lamp and suddenly pitched forward onto the floor, crying out in surprise.
“What’s wrong, Danny?” Chris yelled, waving her hands before her, trying to find her way.
“I’m okay,” he called back. “I just tripped. There, the light’s on. Holy shit!”
Chris found the front door and stepped into the room. “What is it? What’s the matter?”
Danny leaped back and looked at the struggling heap on the floor in front of him. “Shit, it’s Jon!”
“Is he hurt?”
“I don’t know; wait a minute.” Danny grappled with the tape over Larsen’s eyes, and finally yanked it away. Larsen blinked in the light. Danny ripped off the tape over his mouth.
“Thanks very much, Danny,” Larsen said. “Now do you think you could get my hands free?”
It took him a couple of minutes, but Danny finally was able to unwind the duct tape. Larsen sat up and began working on the tape around his ankles.
“Jon, you tell me this minute, are you all right?” Chris demanded.
“I’ve got one hell of a headache,” Larsen replied, “but I’m all right.” The last of the tape came free, and, steadying himself on the arm of the sofa, Larsen struggled to his feet. He sat down immediately. “Jesus, I’m a little woozy, and I feel nauseated.”
Danny sat Chris down next to the policeman. “You take care of him; I’ll see if I can find something to help.” Danny went into the kitchen, found a dishcloth, wet it, and brought it back to Larsen.
Larsen held the cloth to his face and then the back of his neck.
“Jon, can you tell us what happened?”
“Tell me where I am, and I’ll try to figure it out.”
“You’re in the Millman guest house.”
“Oh, Jesus, now I remember; I picked the lock and got inside. I thought it was deserted; I guess I was wrong.”
“I think we should get you to an emergency room and make sure you’re all right,” Chris said.
“She’s right, Jon,” Danny agreed.
“No, I’m feeling better now. You sure got here fast.”
“Not really,” Chris replied. “It’s after midnight.”
“Oh,” Larsen groaned. “Then I’ve been out for hours.”
“So were we,” Chris said. “Danny and I both fell asleep, waiting for you to call.”
“I’m glad you came,” Larsen said, looking around. “Well, he’s gone. There was still a lot of his stuff here when I got into the house. There was a suitcase in the bedroom, and some boxes and some magazines. I think I was about to read his name on a magazine address label when the sonofabitch hit me.”
Danny went and looked in the bedroom and kitchen, then returned. “Looks like he left nothing,” he said.
Jon carefully picked up the phone on the table by the sofa and dialed a number. “This is Larsen,” he said. “I want a fingerprint team right now.” He gave the address and hung up. “Let’s find out if Admirer is as smart as he thinks he is.”
Two hours later, the detectives were still combing the guest house.
“Looks like he wiped everything down,” one of them said.
“Not everything,” replied the other, pointing at the bottom of the telephone. “I’ve got a good print right here; male, left hand, second finger, I’d say. He held the phone in his left hand and made a call with his right.”
“Good,” Larsen said. “Let’s get back to the office and run it. I want to know who this bastard is.”
CHAPTER
26
Larsen tried not to look at the chief of detectives. His head and neck hurt so much he could hardly turn his head, and Herrera was sitting with his back to the window. The light hurt Larsen’s eyes, and Herrera was not happy.
“Let’s see,” Herrera said, while counting on his fingers, “you attempted to apprehend a potentially dangerous suspect without calling for backup; you illegally entered a premises; you allowed the suspect to overpower you and take your weapon and your police radio; you sustained a head injury sufficient to cause unconsciousness and did not seek a medical evaluation; and you have apparently become personally involved with a crime victim in an active case. And then you waste a fingerprint team on a sweep that takes three hours and turns up nothing. Does that about cover it?”
Larsen nodded.
“Speak up, I didn’t hear that.”
“Yessir, that about covers it. I would like to point out that I had Mrs. Millman’s permission to enter her guest house.” This was a lie, but just let Herrera try to get the woman on the phone to prove it. It was the only one of his actions that constituted a crime, and he didn’t want his chief to have that to hold over him; it was grounds for outright dismissal from the force.
“Swell,” Herrera said.
Larsen knew he should leave well enough alone, but he couldn’t. “I’d also like to point out that we did find a print, and that there’s nothing in police regulations that bars me from being friends with a crime victim.”
“You’re fucking her, aren’t you?”
Larsen was on his feet. “Why don’t you bring me before a review board, and we’ll call her as a witness and find out!”
Herrera stood up, too, and leaned across his desk. “I’m not going to take insubordination from you, Larsen.”
Suddenly all the impotence and repressed anger that had lurked in Larsen’s mind came out. “And I’m not going to take any horseshit about my personal life from you! Okay, so I didn’t call for backup, but nobody got hurt but me; the pistol was my personal property, and I’ll be happy to reimburse the department for the radio. And if you suspend or reassign me, or even put a reprimand in my jacket, I’ll ask for a review board and defend my conduct and my record
there.”
To Larsen’s astonishment, Herrera backed down.
“All right, all right, keep your shirt on,” the chief said, and both men sat down again. “I want you to see a doctor immediately, and I want to see his report.”
“Yessir,” Larsen said.
“And don’t you fuck around with this Admirer guy again unless you’ve got backup. Now get out of here.”
“Thank you, chief,” Larsen said, and he got out of there.
The young resident looked at the CAT scan and then at Larsen. “This is clear, but you’re lucky you don’t have a skull fracture. You were out for several hours, and it takes one hell of a wallop to do that. If you’d come into the ER last night, I’d certainly have admitted you for observation. There’s no doubt you were concussed, but if you’ve gone this long without keeling over, you’re probably not going to die.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Larsen said.
The resident scribbled rapidly on Larsen’s chart, then wrote a prescription. “I want you to go home and stay in bed for twenty-four hours.” He ripped the prescription form off the pad. “Take one of these every four hours; they’ll relax you and help with the pain. And if you experience any nausea I want you back in the ER pronto.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
At home, Larsen took one of the pills and sat down on the bed. He picked up the phone and dialed Chris’s number.
“Hello?”
“It’s Jon.”
“What about the fingerprint? Did you identify him?”
“No, there was no match in anybody’s fingerprint files—ours or the FBI’s. That means he’s never been arrested, never been in the armed services.”
“Oh,” she said.
“But when we pick him up, the fingerprint can put him in that guest house, so we can add a battery charge to the list.”
“That’s good. How are you feeling?”
“Tired. I saw a doctor, and he gave me a prescription. I’m to stay in bed for twenty-four hours.”
“You do that. Want me to come and make chicken soup?”
“That’s a nice offer; I’ll take you up on it when I’m in a condition to appreciate it more. Have you heard from him today?”
“Of course. Just the roses, though. Melanie takes them to a children’s hospital out in the Valley every day. I never thought I’d be sick of the scent of roses.”
“Don’t you be alone for a minute,” Larsen said. “He’s never attempted anything except when you were alone.”
“Don’t worry, Danny and Melanie have me covered. You get some rest, and call me tomorrow, you hear?”
“You can count on it.” He hung up and fell back onto the bed, exhausted.
He slept from two in the afternoon straight through until dawn the next morning, and when he woke up, he felt human again, if a little fuzzy from the drug. He got into some jeans and a sweatshirt and went out for a walk while the air was fresh and cool. He had gone only half a block when he saw the van.
It was parked across the street. A Ford, gray in color, no windows in the rear. Larsen crossed the street and walked around it and tried to see inside. There was nothing that would offer a clue to the identity of the owner. He made a note of the license number and looked for any other distinguishing mark—a dent, a repainted door, anything. There was nothing. He wondered how many vans like this were in the Los Angeles area; hundreds, probably, but he didn’t like the coincidence of finding one on his block. Was Admirer hunting him now? That, didn’t make any sense. The man could quite easily have killed him, if that was what he had wanted.
Larsen ran back to his house. He hadn’t even locked the door, and now he went from room to room, looking for something disturbed, out of place. He found nothing.
When he was sure he was alone in the house, he called the station.
“Officer Martinez,” the duty cop said.
“It’s Larsen; I want you to run a plate for me.” He read off the license plate number of the van.
“Just a sec,” the cop said, and the sound of computer keys tapping came over the phone. “Got it. Belongs to an ’89 Toyota Corolla at a West Hollywood address.”
“Hang on,” Larsen said. He ran out his front door and looked down the block; the van was gone. He went back into the house and picked up the phone. “Report the plate as stolen; it’s currently on a late-model Ford van, gray, last seen in Santa Monica fifteen minutes ago. Arresting officer should hold the driver on the stolen tag and on a charge of battery; I’ll make the case. Call it an APB.”
There were more keystrokes. “It’s in the computer,” Martinez said.
“Add a note to page me immediately on arrest.”
“Done.”
Larsen hung up and went back to bed, annoyed and depressed. This jerk had run rings around him, humiliated him, and he was tired of it. But he was also just tired, and he needed rest. He fell asleep again, desperate for some notion of what to do next.
CHAPTER
27
On Saturday morning, after a couple of days’ rest, Larsen rose early, took a walk, and, seeing no sign of the gray van, returned to the house and made himself some breakfast. The phone rang.
“Hello?”
“It’s Chris. How do you feel about the beach?”
“Pretty good. You have a particular beach in mind?”
“Malibu.”
“Sounds good.”
“Pick me up at ten, and bring a swimsuit. I’m buying lunch.”
“You’ve got a deal.”
Larsen hadn’t had time to replace his windshield, so they drove out to Malibu with the windshield frame down and the wind in their faces. She gave him an address.
“Whose place is this?” he asked.
“It’s the house I’m building,” she replied. “I haven’t been out there since the accident, and I want to see how the place is coming. I use ‘see’ in the figurative sense. You’ll have to do my seeing for me.”
“Glad to.”
“I talk with the construction foreman a couple of times a week and send money when I’m asked to, but I’d like an objective eye cast on what’s been done, and I want to see how I feel about the place.”
“How you feel about it?”
“Since the fall the thought of going out there scares me a little. I want to see if I can get rid of that feeling.”
They arrived at Big Rock, and Larsen found the address. She gave him the combination of the lock on the construction fence, and then they were in the house.
“First impression?” she asked.
“Wow.”
“What do you mean, ‘wow’?”
“I mean, wow, what a neat place!”
“Tell me what you see.”
“Well, they’ve got the roof on, and the cedar shingle siding. It’s the color of new wood right now, but it’ll turn gray when it’s weathered. The windows are in, and most of the interior walls have been dry-walled. I’d say you’re only a few weeks from completion.”
She took his hand. “Okay, we’re in the entrance hall now, so we’ll turn right and start with the kitchen.” She took him that way, then through the living room.
“Great view of the ocean,” he said. “I like the big windows. Hey, the deck looks finished.”
“Let’s go out there.”
“I haven’t seen the rest yet.”
“I’ll show it to you later.”
They moved out onto the deck. The sun was warm and there was a nice breeze from the Pacific.
“There’s a drop-down staircase to the beach,” he said. “Want to go down there?”
“Let me just stand here for a moment first,” she said. “Is there a railing?”
“Don’t worry, you can’t fall again.” He put her hand on the railing.
“Then you go and get our stuff, and I’ll just commune with nature for a minute.”
“Sure.” He went to the car and unloaded it, bringing back their beach clothes and their lunch, then dumped them all on the dec
k.
She reached for her beach bag. “Bring your suit and come along; I’ll show you the rest of the house.”
They looked into her study and the guest room, then ended up in the master suite.
“This is going to be a wonderful room,” he said. “Great space, and that marvelous view, too.”
“I’m going to change,” she said. “You use the guest room.”
“Okay.” He went into the half-finished guest room, hung his clothes on a sawhorse, and got into his swimsuit. “You decent?” he called from the hallway.
“Just a second…now.”
He went into the master suite and saw her in the bikini. Her jeans and underwear were in a pile on the floor.
“Wow again,” he said.
“Thanks,” she laughed. “I needed that.” She held out her hand. “Now let’s go back to the deck and down to the beach.”
He led her to the rear of the house and found the release for the stairs. After he had taken their things down to the sand, he led her down the steps.
“Last time I made this trip it didn’t take nearly as long,” she said. “There are some rocks here, aren’t there?”
“Yes, several good-sized boulders.” He placed her hand on one.
“That’s the sort of thing my head landed on, they tell me.”
“How do you feel about being out here again?”
“I feel great, just angry that I can’t see it yet.”
“That day will come.”
“I’m already seeing light better, and people are definite shapes instead of just blobs. You, for instance, are a very handsome shape.”
“You’re not so bad yourself,” he said. He spread a blanket out and they settled onto it.
“How about a sandwich?” she said. “I’m hungry.”
“Me too.” He opened the cooler and spread the food on the blanket, then opened a bottle of white wine. “What a spread!”
“Thank Danny; he’s great with food, as long as he doesn’t have to cook it.”
“Thank you, Danny,” he said, biting into a smoked-salmon sandwich.
“Tell me about where you live,” she said.
