by Susan Dunlap
McGuire slid out of his own Barracuda, glancing with a certain pride at the fender. Rumpled, just a bit, but not with dents big enough or deep enough for anyone to remember. Parking-lot fenders. And he had a nice coat of dust on it. He’d spent a lot of time finding this ride. But for the engine, it was worth not a cent more than the few hundred he’d paid for it. With that, a good thou more. But he was no fool; the way he drove, no one would guess there was anything but rust under the hood. No one was going to bother stealing it. He’d be fine till the damn thing became a collector’s car. He shrugged; so he’d get a few more dents.
Even in the ’Cuda there was no decent cover here. That was the problem with Vegas. No trees, no bushes, none of those little bus-shelter places to protect you from the cold like there were in the East. They were clear plastic, hardly the best for concealment, but if there’d been one of them here, it’d be so thick with graffiti that it’d do just fine. But there wasn’t. The only cover this neighborhood provided was suspicion of the police. Nobody was going to chance the cops coming to their place, or the neighbors seeing the cops there, not just to report a guy sitting in a car. Still he slunk lower in the seat, leaned his head against the side window, and watched Villas de Las Palmas as if it were a floor show.
He didn’t have to keep an eye on it long. Nothing moved in the dirt courtyard, no doors opened, no window shades shot up. For five, minutes the place could have been a still photo. Then he spotted the guy coming out of the last unit in the row. McGuire snorted. Guy coulda been a redwood. Adcock, the bum, hadn’t mentioned this dick of his was seven feet tall and built like a bear. Sheesh, the guy must weigh twice what he did!
The giant baby dick was in the courtyard now, just standing there. All he needed was a neon sign saying, “What do I do next?”
McGuire snorted again. He was, well, insulted. It wasn’t like he had a license himself or anything, but, sheesh, any idiot could come along and call himself a PI. No wonder the pay was so bad. The guy was lucky this was just a poor neighborhood, not a really rough block, or he’d a been picked off from three sides by now. Didn’t he even know enough to do his thinking in his car?
The Weasel relaxed. This baby dick was going to be no problem. Twice his size, sure, but the Weasel hadn’t survived all these years on the Marquis of Queensbury. Blockhead like this, he’d be around behind him and have his big face in the dust before he could say Weasel.
Then McGuire spotted what the blockhead was puzzling over. Girl. Looked to be seven or eight. Walking toward the apartments. Blockhead was coming toward her, like a chiquita like that was going to do anything but run when she spotted him.
One chance was all he’d get, and Tchernak knew it as he eyed the girl on the sidewalk. Kids liked him in the same way they liked Ezra. In some way they felt like they’d tamed this big creature. But there had to be trust to begin with, and here in this neighborhood he might not get a chance to show he was okay.
The little girl was half hidden behind her brown paper bag. She glanced toward Villas de Las Palmas, kicked something on the sidewalk, glanced back at the building, moving slower with each step. With a final glance toward her destination, she swung her foot hard and lobbed the lump toward the street.
Tchernak sprinted into the street, scooped up the deflated ball before it splatted to the macadam, and sailed it back to the haphazardly lit sidewalk.
The girl hesitated, then grinned and kicked it back.
Three plays later Tchernak said to her, “You’re good.”
Again she hesitated. “Never talk to strangers”—she had to be weighing that injunction against the seduction of praise. “I’m on the Blessed Virgin soccer team.”
“Well, then, you guys must be champions.”
“Not yet. But we’re in the play-offs.”
“Betcha win.”
She couldn’t restrain a grin.
“You ever play with the boys in the corner apartment?”
“I used to, a little,” she said, shifting the bag to her left arm. “They could kick good, but they didn’t know the rules. They were dumb.”
“They didn’t speak English?”
She shrugged. “They never said anything. I told them the rules, but they didn’t listen; they just did what they wanted.”
“Where are they now?”
“Gone. They got sick and the blond lady came and took them away.” She shifted the bag again and looked toward the apartment. “I have to go.”
“The blond lady, did she come with a man like me? Like me, but a lot smaller?” he added, grinning.
The girl smiled, then looked nervously toward the apartments.
Had she spotted a shade moving? A big gringo hulking over one of their children, that was something they’d call the police about, pronto. Or worse. Tchernak stiffened, keeping back from the girl. “Was the blond lady with a man?”
“No, not her. The nice señora came with him. I have to go”
“Your mother doesn’t usually let you out after dark?”
“No. I always have to be home before the streetlights are on.”
“But she’s sick, huh? So she broke her rule and sent you out for groceries.”
“Yes. The blond lady won’t come and take her away, will she? You won’t tell?” She was edging back now, the desperation clear in her high melodic voice.
“Thank you.” He was tempted to stay and watch till she was safely in the apartment, but good sense told him it would be better for both of them if he did his watching from the car.
He hurried to the car, suddenly awash with guilt. What was this sickness the boys had and who was the “blond lady” who had taken the boys? Maybe his next move should be calling hospitals.
He climbed into the Jeep.
He didn’t note the old sedan across the street, or hear the soft steps crossing the macadam, didn’t see the Weasel making his way around the building.
Louisa Larson was parked so far away, she couldn’t make out facial expressions. But she could read body language, and she guessed the girl gave Tchernak more than was good. Sarita was a chatty little girl. But Louisa froze around children. It always surprised her; she was so good with adults. But kids didn’t take to her the way adults did, and it bothered her every time she came up against them. Now that she needed information from Sarita, each time she had asked, she knew there was something the girl wasn’t telling her. Something, it looked like, she’d blurted right out to the big detective.
She shifted her shoulder and braced her legs, ready to slide out.
Before Tchernak started his engine, the door to an old car she had barely noticed banged, and there was that little thug shooting across the street. If she’d blinked, she would have missed him. Who’d have thought he could move that fast. The guy wasn’t young. The big guy, Brad, missed him entirely.
For a moment she lost sight of the thug in the shadows of the building, then he moved and she couldn’t so much see him as make out a darker black that could have been anything. She had to keep looking back at it to remember which shadow was his.
Tchernak was pulling out. She tensed, started her engine.
Still camouflaged by shadows, the thug eased toward the courtyard. It didn’t take a Nobel researcher to figure out his next move. He was just waiting till Brad cleared out. Her he hadn’t even noticed.
She hoped Sarita’s mother could get to a phone fast. Or bang on the wall. The complex was full of people. She could scream and have neighbors pouring in from both directions. Living in a place like this, she’d know how to take care of herself and her child.
Brad pulled out.
She had to follow him. He didn’t know where the boys were, but he knew something. He was the only lead she had. There wasn’t time to wait here. Besides, what did she think she was going to do to stop the thug? If she could have handled him, she wouldn’t have ended up trussed like Sunday dinner in her own office. She started the engine, stepped on the gas, then eased her foot off, picked up her cell phone, dial
ed 911, and gave them the address. “Man threatening a child in Unit Four.” She hung up before they could question her. The police would have her phone number on the screen. Could they pull up the make and license of her car too? She couldn’t wait around to find out.
She gave a last look at Sarita’s door. She liked the little girl, she realized with a start. But the boys were her first priority. She had to find them. She couldn’t let Brad’s Jeep out of sight. She had to get to the boys. She stepped hard on the gas and shot through the intersection. Brad was barely doing the speed limit. It wasn’t till she had settled in half a block behind that she realized she hadn’t heard any police siren.
CHAPTER 23
THE WOMAN IN THE morgue was no farm laborer, no illegal immigrant beholden to Luis Vargas. Well-cared-for hands and feet like hers wouldn’t have survived a day of hard labor in the fields. So why had Sheriff Fox latched on to that explanation? Kiernan wondered. To foist blame on her? Or was it a sidebar to something else?
When she walked out of the saloon, Kiernan wasn’t prepared for the utter black, broken only to her right by a lone set of headlights mounting First Street from the highway and, to her left, by a blinking red neon AR. Doubtless the place that served the mediocre ’amburgers that she was not going to get a chance to eat. The windows of the other shops were dark as a ghost town. And the silence …In the city there was the hum of streetlights, the roar and grind of acceleration and braking, bursts of music, conversation, dogs barking, doors shutting—always something. But here the only sound was the night wind scratching the sidewalk and her rubber-soled shoes slapping it. She felt as if the scene were not quite real, governed by rules she didn’t know. In the city there was safety in numbers. She knew how to work those numbers, to find the ally, the distraction, the group to use as a shield. Here there was nothing.
She hurried up the sidewalk and crossed to the covered walk by the morgue. Wind smacked her collar against her neck as if taunting her with the inadequacy of her cotton jacket. She had forgotten how cold nights were in the dry and treeless desert. Her arms were already pressed against her sides, but the attempt at warmth was useless, one cold body part wedged against another.
The mortuary was dark, boasting no viewing-room light to outline a burglar. For a place with an unlocked back door, keeping a front-room light on all night would be an uncalled-for extravagance. She hurried on, wishing she had used the daylight to note how far the end of the block was and if an alley looped back. In autopsies she had uncovered bodies layer by layer, first observing clothing, then scrutinizing the skin, and finally peeling back the skin and snipping the ribs. Often, by then, her exterior examinations prepared her for findings inside. Building searches should be the same. And tonight was like being led blindfolded, handed a scalpel, and told to find the liver. Or in this case the L tattoo. If Fox’s tale about the L tattoo was not just bait, not just a setup.
Two storefronts were dark, and even the AR window was dim. A gust of voices blew out of the doorway as she went by, but it was quieter in there than she would have guessed.
Next to the bar was a walkway. She moved in, immediately thankful for the shelter of the buildings. Anyone looking at her progress up the street would assume she had done as she said and headed into the bar for dinner. Anyone not invested in a setup. Now, if only the walkway went all the way through to the back of the businesses. She hurried on, moving flat-footed. The light from the bar was gone, and she squinted against the black, moved carefully up a wooden staircase, and found herself on a narrow street. Dim squares of light shone from houses on the far side, marking the windows but adding no light to the street. On the near side an overgrown bank led down to the row of businesses. She counted three storefronts to the mortuary.
Scrambling down an incline through underbrush she couldn’t see, for the purpose of breaking into the funeral home to eyeball a dead body—good she wouldn’t be telling Tchernak about this. She heel-skied down the incline, her feet smacking into hard protrusions, sharp things grabbing at her pant legs, accompanied by scurrying noises she chose not to think about. Closer now, she could make out an unpaved alley one lane wide running from the corner as far as the funeral home. The bar owners, with their more-socially-acceptable street-side deliveries, hadn’t bothered to clear ground another fifty feet.
She stopped beside the alley, checked around her, but in the dark she couldn’t tell if a car had parked there recently, only that the brush had not been smoothed by regular parking.
No light illumined the wood-paneled double door, but she could make out the sign next to it: Constant Mortuary. It was a door she was not going through. Slowly she walked along the track back toward the hotel, looking for nooks between storefronts, sheriff’s deputies huddled in them. In this little valley between hillside and buildings the wind was weaker, but the cold from the ground held her feet and calves like icy metal clamps. After fifty yards she turned and started back, this time eyeing the roofline. There had to be a window well midway to the street.
Was she walking wide-eyed into a trap? The don’t-try-this-at-home-kids of investigators’ training? “Couldn’t resist, could you?” Tchernak would be saying. “Just couldn’t wait and see.”
For once the man would be right. Fox had made his reputation by letting a suspect assume he was free. If she walked—or morgue-broke—into a trap she’d not only be in jail, she’d be a fool. But if she did the prudent thing, the woman’s body would disappear into the bureaucracy or the crematorium, and Fox’s statement about her would become accepted fact. There would be no proof Fox was lying. She would never know if this was the index case of an epidemic barely dodged. And the dead woman would be a faceless, nameless addendum to a blip in history, hidden forever.
Besides, she could move fast. She took the stairs to a porch, two units down from the mortuary, swung herself up over the porch, and stepped onto the tar-paper roof. In the starless dark the wind snapped her pant legs. Scraping noises came from behind her. She jerked around. Roof rats, she told herself. Frightened little creatures running away. But suddenly her running shoes felt paper thin.
The window well was close to the back alley, an octagonal hole three feet across, a one-story-high air vent. It was hardly large enough to funnel in sunlight at noon, but for her purposes the narrow space was ideal. She ran a foot along the edge of the roof, knocking pebbles and other detritus into the well. She froze, alert for reactions to the telltale noise. Whisperings, feet moving closer. All she could make out was the wind playing with an edge of tar paper.
Kneeling, she stuck her head over the edge and peered down into utter black. The smell of rot was nauseating. Creatures had died down there for a hundred years.
She tested the gutter, swung herself over, and walked her feet down the wall till she could feel the top of the window. The air was so thick with dust, rodent hairs, and decayed organic matter, she felt like she was inhaling mulch. With sudden foreboding she slid her feet along the top of the window frame. She had been assuming the mortician opened this window, this lone source of natural light, but now, as she tried to shift the window down with her feet, she realized the truth. This window never was opened.
Her arms were tiring. She didn’t have time to ponder. Kicking in the glass would be so simple. And so stupid.
She swung her feet to the far wall and, splayed out flat, she inched her way down toward the window. Her shoulders burned, her hamstrings cramped, and she had to jam her legs to keep from dropping face first into the pit. The stink of decay filled her nose, and she had to breathe through her clenched teeth. She felt the top of the window, grasped it so hard her fingers throbbed, and swung her feet down to the window ledge.
The putty on the top window crumbled at her touch. The pane moved. She wedged her fingers around it, gripping the glass between fingers and palm, vibrating the pane till it came loose.
Her arm was shaking. She couldn’t feel her feet. Gripping the glass harder, she lowered it as far as she could and dropped it
into the carpet of decay at the well bottom. She slid through the window and into the mortuary, and stood, ignoring her screaming wrists and ankles, listening for the sheriff’s voice, for doors opening softly, for muffled footsteps. But the only sound was her own constricted breathing.
The reek of formaldehyde confirmed that it was the embalming room she was in. Even in the dark she could make out the table on which the dead woman had lain hours earlier. It was empty now. The woman’s body would be stored in the fridge at the far end of the room.
She scanned the countertops, but of course there was nothing like a flashlight. She stood still once more, holding her breath. No telltale breathing or hiss of official whispers outside. That was as good a sign as she was likely to get, and it meant nothing. She switched on the ceiling light and waited.
The switch was red. Her hands, she saw, were covered in blood and soot. Her scraped palms stung. Oh, God, an open wound. She grabbed the antiseptic she’d used earlier and poured it on her hands straight. Her skin was still burning as she yanked open a drawer and pulled on latex gloves.
The fridge door was heavy; she braced her feet and pulled.
The gurney was empty. The body was gone. The freezer air wafted out and wrapped the icy smell of death around her.
A door creaked. She eased the freezer shut and stood still, listening. Above were noises she hadn’t heard before—crunching, swishing. Feet? Or was it just the wind? She couldn’t tell over the drumming of her heart.
She gave her head another sharp shake. She couldn’t come up empty here; she had to have some proof of the woman she saw, the carefully groomed woman. She pulled open drawers, eyed boxes of insurance forms, boxes of pens.
