Nightcrawlers nd-30

by Bill Pronzini

  Nightcrawlers

  ( Nameless Detective - 30 )

  Bill Pronzini

  Bill Pronzini

  Nightcrawlers

  PROLOGUE

  FRIDAY NIGHT-SAN FRANCISCO

  “There he is,” Tommy said.

  Bix squinted past him through the passenger-side window. “Yeah. Our meat, all right. Lookit that fag coat, fag mustache, the way he walks.”

  “Nobody else around.”

  “Perfect, man.”

  “You ready?”

  Bix giggled the way he always did when he was high, pulled his Giants cap down low on his forehead. “Hot to trot.”

  “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  They rolled on past, slow. Downhill a ways, the headlights picked out an alleyway between a couple of the big old houses, both of them dark. Bix wheeled the pickup over to the curb in front of the alley. Before it came to a full stop, Tommy was out and moving with the Little League bat under his coat. Bix had to yank on the emergency brake, cut the lights and the engine before he jumped out, and then he got his big feet tangled and almost fell down in the street. Christ. Slow and clumsy and stupid, stoned or sober.

  Tommy moved up on the sidewalk, taking it easy, letting Bix catch up. “Hey, pretty boy,” he called, not too loud.

  The faggot stopped. Tommy moved over when Bix got there, one on either side, facing him, not crowding him yet. Pretty boy, yeah. But not for much longer. Excitement began to run inside Tommy, drying his mouth, putting sweat on his palms. Oh man, oh baby!

  “What’s your hurry, sweet thing?” Bix asked the queer.

  “It’s late and I’m going home.”

  “Pretty late, all right. Where you been?”

  “Working. Tending bar.”

  “Yeah. Fruit drinks for Castro fruits, right?”

  “What do you want?” Cool, a little pissed, but not scared. Not yet.

  “What you think we want?” Tommy said.

  “All I have on me is five dollars-”

  “Hey, you got us wrong. We’re not after your money.”

  “That’s right,” Bix said. “Something else we want.”

  “… Oh, so that’s it. Well, you’ve got the wrong person.”

  “Uh-uh. We don’t think so.”

  “I don’t do that kind of thing.”

  Bix giggled.

  “I mean it, I’m not a street hustler. I happen to be in a stable relationship-”

  “Stable?” Bix giggled again. “You live in a stable? You and your boyfriend bugger each other in a stable?”

  “Shut up,” Tommy snapped at him. He said to Pretty Boy, “Lying queer bastard.”

  Pretty Boy made a disgusted noise and started to push ahead. They blocked him, crowding him a little now.

  “What’s the idea? I want to go home.”

  Bix said, “Not yet, sweet thing.”

  “Come on, just leave me alone.”

  “We got other plans.”

  “If you don’t get out of my way-”

  “What’ll you do? Pee in your panties?”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “No? You oughta be, boyfucker.”

  “I’ll yell. I’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.”

  “Uh-uh. No, you won’t.”

  Pretty Boy opened his mouth, but they were all set for him. It was just what they were waiting for, just like the other times. Bix got him in a bear hug from behind and Tommy jammed the greasy rag into his mouth, all the way in. He started grunting and choking, flailing around, trying to kick them with his twinkle toes. Tommy put a stop to that with a punch in the gut, a knee in the crotch. Pretty Boy doubled up, sagged; a moan slid out of him sweet as music.

  They dragged him into the alleyway, threw him down, watched him crawl around in a little circle like a dog that’d just been run over. Then Bix started giving him the boot, one two three kick, one two three kick. “Hey,” Tommy said, “you don’t get all the fun,” and he hauled out the Little League bat and went to work himself.

  Oh man, oh baby!

  The crack of bone breaking damn near gave him a hard-on.

  SATURDAY NIGHT-VALLEJO

  There she is, he thought.

  He knew it as soon as he saw her. The right age, no older than six. Slim, her hair straight and parted in the middle and braided into pigtails. Mostly white skin like cream with a little coffee mixed in. Sweet little smile. Pretty.

  Just like Angie.

  The woman with her was past fifty, heavyset, slow-moving. And black, all black, not mixed blood like the girl. Probably not her mother. Grandmother, aunt, maybe a babysitter. Not too careful, either. Didn’t hold the girl’s hand, let her run ahead or veer off or lag behind as they crossed the parking lot. Kept looking straight ahead-worrying on something, not paying much attention to her surroundings. He might be able to take the kid right here, tonight, when they came out. If not, he’d follow them home. There’d be another opportunity soon enough. The hard part was finding her. Now that he had, he could afford to relax and be patient.

  He watched them enter the supermarket. Might as well go in himself. He was out of bottled water, almost out of cigarettes; might be enough time to stock up. He was tired of sitting, too, muscles all cramped up. He’d been in the Suburban five hours straight tonight, since four o’clock. Long hours every night after work, longer hours on the weekends, for three weeks now. Driving around, driving around-San Francisco, the Peninsula, San Jose, East Bay, North Bay. Shopping centers, strip malls, parks, day-care centers, anywhere he could think of looking. Two or three that’d seemed right from a distance, but weren’t when he got up close. Too skinny, too young, too old, too dark, too light. He knew he’d find her sooner or later, so he hadn’t been frustrated or anything. But all the driving and looking had taken their toll. The headaches were back and getting worse again. Not as bad as when he got angry, not so bad that he couldn’t think clearly, but bad enough so the Percodan didn’t help anymore. Right behind his eyes, so much pressure that sometimes it felt like they’d pop right out of their sockets. He wondered if he needed glasses. Maybe he’d go see an eye doctor later on.

  He swung out of the SUV. He’d parked in a shadowed space off to one side, where he had a clear view of the entrance. He pinched his eyes with thumb and forefinger, flexed his back and shoulders, got his legs moving and went inside.

  The bright fluorescent glare made him squint and blink. The woman and the little girl weren’t at any of the checkout stands or in any of the nearby aisles. Soft drinks and bottled water to his left; he went that way, picked up two quarts of Crystal Geyser, and then moved back and sideways in front of the dairy cases. Still no sign of them until he reached the produce section.

  He saw the woman first. Basket looped over one arm, feeling up tomatoes and paying no mind to the little girl. She was running circles around a bin of corn, pigtails flying, playing some kind of game like Angie used to do. He walked by, slow and close. She looked up and saw him. Put on the brakes, gave him a gap-toothed smile that lit up that sweet face like a jacko’-lantern, then started running again. His throat tightened, his mouth tasted brassy.

  Angie, he thought.

  He went on up to the express checkout, bought a couple of packs of Marlboros and the bottled water. Outside, the cold air hit him with a rush and made him realize he was sweating. He opened one of the bottles, took a long swig. Once the brassy taste was gone and the sweat quit oozing out, he was all right again. The ache behind his eyes was starting to ease some, too. That was a good sign. He might be able to sleep tonight, might not even dream.

  In the Suburban he lit a cigarette, sipped water between drags. Waiting the way a cat waits-waiting for the good thing to happen. Who was it had said that to
him about the way cats waited? Mia? He couldn’t stand cats, but Mia’d always liked them. He remembered one time when the three of them… when he and Angie and Mia…

  It was another five minutes before they came out, the woman carrying two plastic grocery sacks, the little girl running and skipping ahead. Their car, some kind of old four-door sedan, was in the first row. The woman hesitated when they got there, as if maybe she’d forgotten something. “Go back inside,” he said out loud, “leave Angie in the car.”

  But she didn’t. It wasn’t going to be that easy. She was just fumbling for the keys. She found them, unlocked the car, and both of them got in and stayed in. The sedan’s engine started, the lights came on. He had the Suburban clear of the space and easing forward before she finished backing up, and he was right behind her when she pulled out of the lot.

  No problem following the sedan. She drove as slow as she moved. And it wasn’t far to go-less than half a mile through a bunch of residential streets to a single-family home within spitting distance of a neighborhood park. The sedan stopped in the driveway, the woman and the little girl got out and went into the house. He didn’t need the number; he’d recognize the place when he came back, couldn’t miss that tree with the tree-house in it over in the side yard. All he’d need was the name of this street and the cross street up ahead where the park was.

  Tomorrow he’d come back, daytime and after dark both. And as many days and nights after that as it took to find out who else lived in the house, how often the girl was alone in the yard or in the park or on her way to and from school. Pick his spot, wait for just the right time. He had a feeling it wouldn’t take long.

  When the time came, he hoped she wouldn’t make too much of a fuss.

  1

  I couldn’t seem to get used to the location of the new offices. The first week after we moved in, I found myself twice on successive mornings heading toward O’Farrell Street instead of south of Market. Automatic pilot. I’d occupied the old space for a lot of years, dating back to my partnership with Eberhardt. A lot of years and a lot of memories, some bad-like the events of last Christmas that had been the catalyst for the move-but most of them fairly good. Funny, but I was having more difficulty letting go of the musty, crusty O’Farrell loft than I’d had giving up the Pacific Heights flat I’d leased for three decades. No regrets or backward looks there, after I handed over the key on January first.

  There was nothing wrong with the new digs. They were at least a couple of steps upscale, in fact. Larger than the loft by half, three good-sized, newly renovated, partly furnished rooms plus private bathroom on the second floor of an old, three-storied, salmon-colored building on South Park. Above us we had an art studio, below us we had a firm of architects, and outside the front windows we had a view of the little tree-shaded park and the architectural mixed bag that housed private residences, cafes, and small businesses like ours. We also had a five-year lease at a surprisingly reasonable monthly nut. Ever since the dot-com industry collapse, prime office space in the city had gone begging and real estate firms and holding companies were only too glad to cut a deal in order to fill a vacancy long-term. An even better deal had been offered to us in Multimedia Gulch, the section between Potrero Hill and the Mission that had been a dot-com haven during the short-lived boom and was now something of a business ghost town, but neither Tamara nor I had much cared for the location. Too far from downtown, for one thing; and there was a small but persistent stigma attached to the area that extended to new firms moving in, as if a Gulch address were a brand of eventual failure.

  South Park, on the other hand, was a well-regarded, ellipzoidal chunk of Bohemian-era San Francisco tucked between Second and Third, Brannan and Bryant. In the 1860s it had been the center of the Rincon Hill residential district, home of the city’s wealthiest families. After the seat of wealth and fashion shifted to Nob Hill, South Park had had an up-and-down history-mostly down until the 1970s, when urban renewal created SoMa and South Beach and turned South Park back into a desirable high spot. From a business point of view it had a couple of downsides: It was near the Bay Bridge approach and inclined to be noisy, and street parking was at a premium and garage facilities neither in close proximity nor reasonably priced. But those were minor compared to the upsides of location, size, and cheap rent. The new offices were only half a dozen blocks from the financial district, another half dozen from the Ferry Building and the waterfront and the bridge.

  Tamara was the one who had orchestrated the move. Haggled with the real estate agent, arranged the transfer of the few furnishings and other equipment worth salvaging from O’Farrell Street, set up the new offices. All Jake Runyon, the agency’s new field operative, and I did was some donkey work and arranging of personal space. That was fine with me. Tamara was good at handling details, and she had a long-range vision as to what the agency could and should be if it was going to continue to grow. South Park had been her idea; so had an aggressive advertising campaign to go along with the usual change-of-address notification sent out to our client list.

  I suppose that was the underlying reason why, after three months, I still couldn’t quite adapt to the new digs. On O’Farrell Street and in the offices prior, the agency had been mine alone-I was the sole proprietor for most of the thirty-plus years I’d been in the detective business. Here on South Park, the agency was Tamara’s. New surroundings, new direction. The passing of the baton, the old and settled giving way to the young and ambitious. Fundamentally I had no problem with that; hell, if I had I wouldn’t have decided to semiretire and make her a full partner. I was still one of the bosses, nothing of importance was done without my input, and yet I couldn’t help a certain feeling of displacement, of being left behind. Made me feel sad now and then. Maybe it was just a function of incipient old age and a lifelong resistance to change. Kerry thought so, and she’s a lot smarter than I am.

  In any event, there was no question that Tamara knew what she was doing. At the ripe old age of twenty-six she’s also smarter than I am. The move and the advertising had paid off much more quickly than I’d expected. Now, in early April, business was booming to the point where we were probably going to have to hire yet another operative to help handle the caseload. As it was, I was working four days and sometimes a full week-nearly twice the number of hours I’d promised Kerry, Emily, and myself when I semiretired. Runyon was putting in sixty-hour weeks, but he was a recent widower, estranged from his son by his also-deceased first wife, and a workaholic. Tamara logged in even more time than that. Now that her cellist boyfriend, Horace, had moved to Philadelphia, and she was living alone, she’d taken to compensating in the same workaholic fashion as Runyon. She’d even begun to do a little of the fieldwork, after hours, ostensibly because she wanted to learn more about that end of the business, but mainly, I suspected, because it helped keep loneliness at bay.

  So here I was at South Park bright and early on Monday morning, ready to tackle another full day’s workload. The desk in the big anteroom was empty; that was the one Runyon used when he was in, which wasn’t often. Right now he was in L.A., on a skip trace connected to a homicide trial for a prominent local defense attorney. The room was big, sunny on sunny days like this one, the walls dove-gray with what Kerry called “black accents,” the new furniture stylish black leather-and-chrome. One of these days, if Tamara had her way, there’d be another desk and a secretary/receptionist behind it. I had no doubt that it would happen in the foreseeable future. Nor any doubt that under her guidance the agency would one day be as large or larger than McCone Investigations, down on the Embarcadero-maybe spawn a couple of satellites in other cities. She was not only a smart businesswoman, she had ambition and an entrepreneurial turn of mind.

  The two private offices at the rear were side by side, the one on the west a little larger-the bathroom had been added on to the east-side office-and with the better view. She’d insisted I take the larger one; I insisted she have it. We’d wrangled a little, but as the senior par
tner I had the final say. When I walked into the east office this morning, I could see her at her desk through the connecting door, which we kept open unless one of us was with a client. She was in her usual pose, hunched over her computer keyboard, a study today in dark brown and spring yellow. There’d been a time when she dressed like a character in a bad street movie, but that was long past. Now she wore suits and blouses and shoes with designer labels and had her hair done by professionals instead of self-styling it with an eggbeater or whatever she’d used.

  She’d changed, Ms. Corbin had, in the five years since she’d first come to work for me. And considerably in the four months since the holiday ordeal in our old offices on O’Farrell Street-a hostage situation in which she and Runyon and I had come close to dying at the hands of a madman armed with an arsenal of weapons. That experience seemed to have had a profound effect on her. She was less prickly now, less inclined to grumble and to sudden mood swings, more coolly professional in her dealings with clients. More self-assured, as if she understood herself better and was more comfortable in her own skin. Even her speech was less peppered with the Ebonic and slang phrases she’d sometimes wielded like tools of self-defense. She still had her sense of humor, but it didn’t have the edge it once had and she didn’t put me on quite as often as she once did. In a way I missed the old Tamara, but I had even greater admiration and affection for the new one.

  She was wrapped up in what she was doing and didn’t notice me at first. I shed my coat, thumped my briefcase down on the desk, and then entered her office.

  “Morning, kiddo.”

  “Morning,” she said without looking up. “I heard you come in.”

  “Sure you did. Ever vigilant.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How’s that for an agency motto? ‘Ever Vigilant.’ ”

  “Retro. Like ‘We Never Sleep.’ ”