by Ian Rankin
“Well, driving’s fine—it’s the stopping that can be a problem. Make sure parking is authorized next time before you settle down.” The cop straightened up.
“Thank you, officer,” said Reeve, putting the car into gear.
And after that, they were tailing him. It looked to Reeve like a two-car unmarked tail with a few patrol cars as backup and lookouts. He drove around by the airport and then took North Harbor Drive back into town, cruising the waterfront and crossing the Coronado Bay Bridge before doubling back downtown and up First Avenue. The downtown traffic wasn’t too sluggish, and he sped up as he left the high towers behind, eventually following signs to Old Town State Park. He parked in a lot adjacent to some weird old houses which seemed to be a center of attraction, and crossed the street into the park itself. He reckoned one car was still with him, which meant two men: one of them would probably keep watch on the Blazer, the other following on foot.
He stopped to take a drink from a water fountain. Old Town comprised a series of buildings—stables, blacksmith’s, tannery, and so on—that might be original and might be reconstructions. The buildings were swamped, however, by souvenir and gift shops, Mexican cafés and restaurants. Reeve couldn’t see anyone following him, and went into the courtyard of one of the restaurants. He was asked if he wanted a table, but he said he was looking for a friend. He crossed the courtyard, squeezing past tables and chairs, and exited the restaurant at the other side.
He was right on the edge of the park and skirted it, finding himself on a street outside the perimeter, a couple of hundred yards from where his car was parked. This street had normal shops on either side, and at the corner stood two taxicabs, their drivers leaning against a lamppost while they chatted.
Reeve nodded to them and slipped into the backseat of the front cab. The man took his time winding up the conversation, while Reeve kept low in the seat, watching from the back window. Then the driver got in.
“La Jolla,” Reeve said, reaching into his pocket for the map.
“No problem,” the driver said, trying to start the engine.
From the rear window, Reeve saw a man jog to the edge of the sidewalk across the street, looking all around. He was slack-jawed from running, and carried a holster under the armpit of his flapping jacket. He might have been one of the other detectives in McCluskey’s office; Reeve wasn’t sure.
The driver turned the ignition again, stamping his foot on the accelerator. The engine turned but didn’t catch.
“Sorry ‘bout this,” the driver said. “Fuckin’ garage told me they fixed it.” He got on his radio to tell base that he was “fucked again,” and whoever he was speaking to started raving at him for cursing on the air.
The cop was still there, talking into a two-way now, probably liaising with his partner back at the Blazer. Reeve hoped the partner was saying that the suspect was bound to return to his car, so they might as well sit tight…
“Hey, man,” the driver said, turning in his seat. “There’s an-other cab right behind. You understand English? We ain’t going nowhere.”
Reeve handed the man five dollars without turning from the window.
“This is for your time,” he said. “Now shut up.”
The driver shut up.
The cop seemed to be waiting for a message on his radio. Meantime, he lit a cigarette, coughing hard after the first puff.
Reeve was hardly breathing.
The cop flicked the cigarette onto the road as the message came for him. Then he stuffed the radio back into his jacket, turned, and walked away. Reeve opened the cab door slowly, got out, and shut it again.
“Anytime, man!” the driver called to him.
He got into the second cab. The driver was prompt to arrive.
“His engine fuckin‘ up again?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Reeve.
“Where to?”
“La Jolla,” said Reeve. The map was still in his hand. He’d folded it so that his destination wasn’t showing. It was something he’d learned during Special Forces training: if you were caught, the enemy couldn’t determine from the way your map was folded your landing point or your final destination. Reeve was glad he still knew the trick and had used it without thinking about it, like it was natural, a reaction.
Like it was instinct.
They stopped a few streets away from the one where Dr. Killin lived. It was only a matter of days since James Reeve had been driven there by Eddie Cantona. Reeve didn’t think the ex-CWC scientist would have returned; though with Jim out of the picture permanently it was just possible.
Cantona had told him about the man who’d been painting the fence. Why get your fence painted when you were going to be away? More likely that you’d stay put to see the job was done properly. It wasn’t like an interior job, where the smell of paint or the mess might persuade you to leave the house while the work was being done. Okay, maybe the painter had just been booked for that time, and wasn’t going to rearrange other jobs just so Killin could be there to oversee the minor work. But as Cantona himself had noted, the fence hadn’t really needed repainting.
The Mexican at the rental company had convinced Gordon Reeve that there was something very wrong about Jim’s death, something very wrong indeed. It wasn’t just murder; there was more to it than that. Reeve was catching glimpses of a conspiracy, a wider plot. Only he didn’t know what the plot was… not yet.
Reeve wanted to know if Killin was back. More, he wanted to know if the house was under surveillance. If it was, then either Jim posed a threat to someone from beyond the grave, or there were others who still posed that threat.
Others like Gordon Reeve himself.
So he had a route he wanted the driver to take, and he went over it with him. They would cross Killin’s street at two interchanges, without driving up the street itself. Only then, if still necessary, would they drive past Killin’s house. Not too slowly, not like they might stop. But slowly enough, like they were looking for a number on the street, but it wasn’t anywhere near the number of Killin’s house.
The driver seemed bemused by his request, so Reeve re-peated what he could in Spanish. Languages: another thing he’d learned in Special Forces. He had a propensity for language-learning, and had specialized in linguistics during his Phase Six training, along with climbing. He learned some Spanish, French, a little Arabic. The Spanish was one reason they’d chosen him for Operation Stalwart.
“Okay?” he asked the driver.
“Is your money, friend,” the driver said.
“Is my money,” Reeve agreed.
So they took the route Reeve had planned for them. The driver went too slowly at first—suspiciously slow—so Reeve had him speed up just a little. As they crossed the intersection he took a good look at Killin’s street. There were a couple of cars parked on the street itself, even though most of the bungalows had garages or parking spaces attached. He saw one freshly painted fence, the color Cantona had said it would be. There was a car half a block down and on the opposite side of the road. Reeve thought he saw someone in it, and that there was a sign on the door of the car.
They drove around the block and came back through an-other intersection, behind the parked car this time. He still couldn’t make out what the sign said. But there was definitely someone in the driver’s seat.
“So what now?” the driver said. “You want we should go down the street or not?”
“Pull over,” Reeve ordered. The driver pulled the car over to the curb. Reeve got out and adjusted the mirror on the passenger side. He got back into the backseat and looked at the mirror, then got out and adjusted it again.
“What’s going on?” the driver asked.
“Don’t worry,” said Reeve. He made another very slight adjustment, then got back in. “Now,” he said, “we drive down the street, just the way we talked about. Okay?”
“Is your money.”
As they neared the parked car with the man in it, approaching it from the front
, Reeve kept his eyes on the wing mirror. He was just a passenger, a bored passenger staring at nothing while his driver figured out an address.
But he had a perfect view of the car as they passed it. He saw the driver study them, and seem to dismiss them. Nobody was expecting anyone to turn up in a cab. But the man was watchful. And he didn’t look to Reeve like a policeman.
“Where now?” the driver asked.
“That car we passed, did you see what was written on the side?”
“Yeah, man, it was some cable company. You know, cable TV. They’re always trying to get you to sign up, sign all your money away in exchange for fifty channels showing nothing but reruns of Lucy and shitty soaps. They been to my house three, four times already; my woman’s keen. They can smell when someone’s keen. Not me. So, where now?”
“Turn right, go a block or two, and stop again.” The driver did so. “You better fix your wing mirror,” Reeve said, so the driver got out to change it back. Reeve had a couple of options. One was to confront the man in the car, give him a hard time. Ask him a few questions while he pressed the life out of him. He knew interrogation techniques; he hadn’t used them in a long time, but he reckoned they’d come back to him like riding a bicycle. Just like the map-folding had come back. Instinct.
But if the man was a pro, and the man had looked like a pro—not like a cop, but like a pro—then he wouldn’t talk; and Reeve would have blown whatever cover he still possessed. Be-sides, he knew what he had come to find out. There was still a watch on Dr. Killin’s house. Someone still wanted to know whenever anyone went there. And it looked like there was nobody home.
His driver was waiting for instructions.
“Back to where you picked me up,” Reeve told him.
He paid the driver, tipped him a ten, and walked back the way he’d come. Back into Old Town State Park. He was in a gift shop, buying a postcard and a stamp and a kite that Allan would probably never use—too low-tech—when he saw the cop from the street corner watching him. The guy looked relieved; he’d probably gone back to his partner and then gotten jumpy, decided to look around. The park was full of tourists who had decamped from some trolley tour; it must’ve been a hard time for him. But now he had his reward.
Reeve left the shop and sauntered back to his car. He drove sedately back to his hotel, and only got lost once. He was assuming now that he was compromised; they’d be following him wherever he went. And if he lost them too often, they’d know they’d been compromised. And they’d either get sneakier—homing devices on his car, for example—or they’d have to gamble on direct assault. Maybe even an accident.
He didn’t think it would be a simple DUI.
In his room he wrote the postcard home and stuck the stamp on, then went down to the front desk to mail it. One man was seated in the reception area. He hadn’t brought any reading material with him, and had been reduced to picking out some of the brochures advertising Sea World, the San Diego Zoo, and the Old Town Trolley Tours. It was a chore to look interested in them. So Reeve did the man a favor: he went into the bar and ordered himself a beer. He was thirsty, and his thirst had won out over thoughts of a cool shower. He savored the chill as he swallowed. The man had followed him in and ordered a beer of his own, looking delighted at the prospect. The man was around the other side of the bar from Reeve. The other drinkers had the laughing ease of conventioneers. Reeve just drank his drink, signed for it, and then went upstairs to his room.
Except it didn’t feel like a room now; it felt like a cell.
SEVEN
NEXT DAY, GORDON REEVE saw the ghost.
Maybe it wasn’t so surprising under the circumstances. It was a strange day in a lot of ways. He packed his things away when he woke up, then went downstairs for breakfast. He was the only guest in the restaurant. The breakfast was buffet-style again. He could smell bacon and sausage. He sat in his booth and drank orange juice and a single cup of coffee. He was wearing his dark suit, black shoes and socks, white shirt, black tie. None of the hotel staff seemed to realize he was on his way to a funeral—they smiled at him the same as ever. Then he realized that they weren’t smiling at him, they were smiling through him.
After breakfast, he brought his bag downstairs and checked out, using his credit card.
“Hope you enjoyed your stay with us, Mr. Reeve,” the smiling robot said. Reeve took his bag outside. There was no one watching him in the hotel lobby, so there’d be someone out here, maybe in the parking lot. Sure enough, as he approached his car, the door opened on a car three bays away.
“Hey, Gordon.”
It was McCluskey. He was wearing a dark suit, too.
“What’s up?” Reeve asked.
“Nothing. Just thought you might have trouble finding the… thought you could follow me there. What do you say?”
What could he say—I think you’re a liar? I think you’re up to something? And I think you know I think that?
“Okay, thanks,” Reeve said, unlocking the Blazer.
He smiled as he drove. They were tailing him from in front, tailing him with his own permission. He didn’t mind, why should he mind? His business here was almost done, for the moment. He needed some distance. A good soldier might have called it safe distance. It was a perfect maneuver: look like you’re retreating when really you’re on the attack. He knew he wasn’t going to learn much more in San Diego without wholly compromising himself. It was time to move camp. He’d been taught well in Special Forces, taught lessons for a lifetime; and as old Nietzsche said, if you remained a pupil, you served your teacher badly.
Someone somewhere had once termed the SAS “Nietzsche’s gentlemen.” That wasn’t accurate: in Special Forces you depended on others as thoroughly as you depended on yourself. You worked as a small team, and you had to have trust in the abilities of others. You shared the workload. Which actually made you more of an anarchist. In Special Forces there was less bull about rank than in other regiments—you called officers by their first names. There was a spirit of community, as well as a sense of individual worth. Reeve was still weighing up his options. He could work alone, or there were people he could call. People he’d only ever call in an emergency, just as they knew they could call him.
He knew he should be thinking of Jim at this moment, but he’d thought about Jim a lot the past few days, and he didn’t see how another hour or two would help. It wasn’t that he’d managed to detach himself from the reality of the situation—his brother was dead, maybe murdered, certainly at the center of a cover-up—but that he’d accepted it so completely he now felt free to think about other things. Mr. Cold Rationalist himself. He hoped he’d stay cool at the cremation. He hoped he wouldn’t reach over and thumb McCluskey’s eyeballs out of their sockets.
The ceremony itself was short. The man at the front—Reeve never did learn if he was a priest, some church functionary, or just a crematorium lackey—didn’t know the first thing about James Reeve, and didn’t try to disguise the fact. As he told Gordon, if he’d had more time to prepare he might’ve said something more. As it was, he kept things nice and simple. He could have been talking about anyone.
There was a coffin—not the one Reeve had been shown at the funeral parlor, some cheaper model with not so much brass and polish. The chapel had some fresh cut flowers which Reeve couldn’t name. Joan would have known them—English and Latin tags. He was glad she’d stayed behind with Allan. If she’d come, he wouldn’t have taken such an interest, would never have met Eddie Cantona. He’d have signed for the body, shipped it home, and gone back to life as before, trying now and again to remember two brothers playing together.
There were just McCluskey and him in the chapel, and some woman at the back who looked like a regular. Then there was the man at the front, saying his words, and someone behind the scenes working the piped music and finally, the little electric curtain that closed over the coffin. The hum of the conveyor belt was just barely audible.
McCluskey held Reeve’s arm lig
htly as they walked back up the aisle; an intimate gesture, like they’d just been married. The woman smiled at them from her pew. She looked to be sticking around for the next service. Guests were already arriving outside.
“You all right?” McCluskey asked.
“Never better,” Reeve said, swallowing back the sudden ache in his Adam’s apple. He almost gagged, but cleared his throat instead and blew his nose. “Shame Cantona couldn’t have been here.”
“He should be out later today. We like to dry the drunks out before we release them back to their bars.”
“Did you see him?”
“No.”
“He wasn’t drunk. He hadn’t touched a drop.”
“Blood test shows different.”
Reeve blew his nose again. He’d been about to say, Why doesn’t that surprise me? Instead he said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Got time or inclination for a drink?”
“I’m afraid you’d pull me in for DUI.”
“Hell, I wouldn’t do that,” McCluskey said, smiling, “not to a tourist. So where to now? The airport?”
Reeve checked his watch. “I suppose so.”
“I’ll come with you. Maybe we can have that drink there.”
“Why not?” Reeve said, though it was the last thing he wanted. They went to their cars. Other vehicles were arriving, including two large black limos bearing the family of the crematorium’s next client. Other cars had arrived early, and the drivers and passengers were waiting to emerge. It looked like a point of etiquette: the chief mourners should be the first to arrive. Reeve’s eyes almost met those of one mourner, sitting in his car with his hands on the steering wheel. But the man had turned away a second before.
He was back out on the highway, following McCluskey, when he realized who the man had reminded him of. He nearly lost control of the Blazer, and braked hard. A pickup behind him sounded its horn, and he accelerated again.
A ghost. He told himself he’d seen a ghost. It was that sort of day.
At check-in, Reeve got rid of his bag. He had a few small items of Jim’s, but otherwise was taking back practically nothing he hadn’t brought with him. Allan’s kite was safely layered between shirts. Maybe he could get some perfume for Joan on the plane. Not that she ever wore perfume.
